The Intercept has published the TSA’s behaviour checklist for spotting terrorists as part of two stories. See, Exclusive: TSA’s Secret Behavior Checklist to Spot Terrorists. The Spot Referral Report includes all sorts of behaviours like “Arrives late for flight …”. The idea of the report is that behaviours are assigned points and if someone gets more than a certain number of points the suspect is referred to a Law Enforcement Officer (LEO). The checklist is part of a SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) Referral Report that is filled out when someone is “spotted” by the TSA. A second story from the Intercept claims that Exclusive: TSA ‘Behavior Detection’ Program Targeting Undocumented Immigrants, Not Terrorists.
Category: Ethics of Data Science
Islamic State doxes US soldiers, airmen, calls on supporters to kill them
Ars Technical has a series of interesting articles about doxing including an article about how the Islamic State doxes US soldiers, airmen, calls on supporters to kill them . How long before IS starts identifying the Canadian special forces sent to advise in the war in Iraq and Syria. Or … imagine the doxing of drone operators as a form of retaliation.
Doxing and other troll tactics seem to be entering the mainstream. Gabriella Coleman in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy writes about Anonymous and their use of various tactics for often admirable causes. She goes further and suggests that trolling may be form of resistance suited to the emerging surveillance state,
Anonymous is emblematic of a particular geography of resistance. Composed of multiple competing groups, short-term power is achievable for brief durations, while long-term dominance by any single group or person is virtually impossible. In such a dynamic landscape, it may be “easy to co-opt, but impossible to be co-opted,” (location 5691 of 8131)
She also sees in Anonymous and trolling the tradition of the trickster. “Trickster tales are not didactic and moralizing but reveal their lessons playfully.” (Location 511 of 8131) It wasn’t long before the tricksters got attacked as the tactics spread. See Dox everywhere: LulzSec under attack from hackers, law enforcement.
The GamerGate controversy showed a much darker side to trolling and how these tactics could be used to bully as much as to resist. The people doxed were mostly women and so-called “social justice warriors” who annoyed certain gamers. Those doxed were hardly the powerful or Big Brother watching us. Now (women) academics who study gaming are being identified. How long before we have to train our graduate students in Anti-doxing strategy as part of preparation for research into games?
Guardian’s destroyed Snowden laptop to feature in major V&A show
Great story about how the Guardian’s destroyed Snowden laptop to feature in major V&A show. This is the laptop that the government forced the Guardian to destroy because they had the Snowden leaked documents on it.
Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep
The Intercept and CBC have been collaborating on stories based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. One recent story is about how Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep. CSE is collecting email going to the government and flagging suspect emails for analysts.
An earlier story titled CSE’s Levitation project: Expert says spy agencies ‘drowning in data’ and unable to follow leads, tells about the LEVITATION project that monitors file uploads to free file hosting sites. The idea is to identify questionable uploads and then to figure out who is uploading the materials.
Glenn Greenwald (see the embedded video) questions the value of this sort of mass surveillance. He suggests that mass surveillance impedes the ability to find terrorists attacks. The problem is not getting more information, but connecting the dots of what one has. In fact the slides that you can get to from these stories both show that CSE is struggling with too much information and analytical challenges.
O’Hagan: The Lives of Ronald Pinn
Thanks to a note from Willard on Humanist I came across this essay in the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan · The Lives of Ronald Pinn (LRB 8 January 2015). The author decided to develop a false identity and “legend” by using the name of a dead person (Ronald Pinn) who was born around the time he was. This was in response to stories about how UK police had been going undercover since 1968 to infiltrate political groups. The police had been bringing identities back to life so O’Hagan decided to try it. In the process he explored a lot of the dark web including ordering drugs from the Silk Road, ordering guns, getting false IDs and so on.
The essay or biography is well written and poignant. Just before ends the legendary Pinn he meets the original’s mother.
‘Oh, Ronnie,’ she said. ‘There was nobody like him.’
Trolling and Anonymous
Useful research is finally emerging about trolling in its different forms. The Guardian had a nice overview article by a professor of business psychologies titled Behind the online comments: the psychology of internet trolls. Researchers at the University of Manitoba and UBC have published an article with the title Trolls just want to have fun (PDF preprint) that found evidence that sadists like to troll. They conclude,
The Internet is an anonymous environment where it is easy to seek out and explore one’s niche, however idiosyncratic. Consequently, antisocial individuals have greater opportunities to connect with similar others, and to pursue their personal brand of ‘‘self expression’’ than they did before the advent of the Internet. Online identity construction may be important to examine in research on trolling, especially in terms of antisocial identity and its role in trolling behavior. The troll persona appears to be a malicious case of a virtual avatar, reflecting both actual personality and one’s ideal self . Our research suggests that, for those with sadistic personalities, that ideal self may be a villain of chaos and mayhem – the online Trickster we fear, envy, and love to hate: the cybertroll. (Buckels, E. E., et al. Trolls just want to have fun. Personality and Individual Differences (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.016)
By contrast, McGill professor Gabriella Coleman recently published a book about Anonymous, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. Coleman also compares the trolling of Anonymous to traditions of the trickster, but is far more sympathetic as she tracks the politicization of Anonymous. About trolling she writes,
Trolls enjoy desecrating anything remotely sacred, as cultural theorist Whitney Phillips conveys in her astute characterization of trolls as “agents of cultural digestion [who] scavenge the landscape, re-purpose the most offensive material, then shove the resulting monstrosities into the faces of an unsuspecting populace.” In short: any information thought to be personal, secure, or sacred is a prime target for sharing or defilement in a multitude of ways. Lulz-oriented actions puncture the consensus around our politics and ethics, our social lives, and our aesthetic sensibilities. Any presumption of our world’s inviolability becomes a weapon; trolls invalidate that world by gesturing toward the possibility for Internet geeks to destroy it—to pull the carpet from under us whenever they feel the urge. (Location 491)
She sees anonymous hacking as one of the ways we can resist the blanket surveillance that Snowden revealed. Anonymous may be the future of resistance even as it emerges from the nasty side of trolling. I can’t say that I’m convinced the ends justify the means, at least when you aren’t willing to take responsibility for the means you employ, but, she is right that it has become a form of resistance for the surveillance age.
Anonymous is emblematic of a particular geography of resistance. Composed of multiple competing groups, short-term power is achievable for brief durations, while long-term dominance by any single group or person is virtually impossible. In such a dynamic landscape, it may be “easy to co-opt, but impossible to keep co-opted,” … (Location 5691)
Adobe is Spying on Users, Collecting Data on Their eBook Libraries
Nate Hoffelder on The Digital Reader blog has broken a story about how Adobe is Spying on Users, Collecting Data on Their eBook Libraries. He and Arts Technica report that the Adobe’s Digital Editions 4 send data home about what you read and how far (what page) you get to. The data is sent in plain text.
Hoffelder used a tool called Wireshark to look at what was being sent out from his computer.
Sensitive Words: Hong Kong Protests
On Thursday I heard a great talk by Ashley Esarey on “Understanding Chinese Information Control and State Preferences for Stability Maintenance.” He has been studying a dataset of over 4,000 censorship directives issued by the Chinese state to website administrators to do things like stop mentioning Obama’s inauguration in headlines or to delete all references to certain issues. I hadn’t realized how hierarchical and human the Chinese control of the internet was. Directives came from all levels and seem to also have been ignored.
In his talk Esarey mentioned how the China Digital Times has been tracking various internet censorship issues in China. At that site I found some fascinating stories and lists of words censored. See:
Exclusive: Hundreds Of Devices Hidden Inside New York City Phone Booths
From The Intercept I followed a link to a Buzzfeed Exclusive: Hundreds Of Devices Hidden Inside New York City Phone Booths. Buzzfeed found that the company that manages the advertising surrounding New York phone booths had installed beacons that could interact with apps on smartphones as the passed by. The beacons are made by Gimbal which claims to have “the world’s largest deployment of industry-leading Bluetooth Smart beacons…” The Buzzfeed article describes what information can be gathered by these beacons:
Gimbal has advertised its “Profile” service. For consumers who opt in, the service “passively develops a profile of mobile usage and other behaviors” that allow the company to make educated guesses about their demographics “age, gender, income, ethnicity, education, presence of children”, interests “sports, cooking, politics, technology, news, investing, etc”, and the “top 20 locations where [the] user spends time home, work, gym, beach, etc..”
The image above is from Buzzfeed who got it from Gimbal and it illustrates how Gimbal is collecting data about “sightings” that can be aggregated and mined both by Gimbal and by 3rd parties who pay for the service. Apple is however responsible for an important underlying technology, iBeacon. If you want the larger picture on beacons and the hype around them see the BEEKn site (which is about “beacons, brands and culture on the Internet of Things) or read about Apple’s iBeacon technology. I am not impressed with the use cases described. They are mostly about advertisers telling us (without our permission) about things on sale. They can be used for location specific (very specific) information like the Tulpenland (tulip garden) app but outdoors you can do this with geolocation. A better use would be indoors for museums where GPS doesn’t work as Prophets Kitchen is doing for the Rubens House Antwerp Museum though the implementation shown looks really lame (multiple choice questions about Rubens!). The killer app for beacons has yet to appear, though mobile payments may be it.
What is interesting is that the Intercept article indicates that users don’t appreciate being told they are being watched. It seems that we only mind be spied on when we are personally told that we are being spied on, but that may be an unwarranted inference. We may come to accept a level of tracking as the price we pay for cell phones that are always on.
In the meantime New York has apparently ordered the beacons removed, but they are apparently installed in other cities. Of course there are also Canadian installations.
The Cult of Sharing
Mike Bulajewski has written an excellent critique of the The Cult of Sharing. He describes the way ideas of community and sharing are being exploited by a new type of cult-like company like Airbnb and Uber. Under the guise of sharing and building community these companies are bypassing employment and labor legislation. What’s worse is that they are painting basic labor rights as the outdated way of doing things.
That’s because they’ve adopted a kind of cultural critique of capitalism. For them, the problem with capitalism is not the system itself, but rather depraved contemporary Western culture, which is greedy, individualistic, selfish and acquisitive, and rewards greedy, corrupt, ill-intentioned individuals. The opponents of the so-called culture of greed see the behavior of Black Friday shoppers and Wall Street bankers as equal manifestations of the same general phenomenon, and perhaps believing that we get the leaders we deserve, conclude that the public’s moral flaws makes them in some way responsible for the greed of Wall Street.
The sharing economy is clearly not the kind of economy where wealth and prosperity is shared between rich and poor. On the contrary, it worsens income inequality and concentrates wealth in the hands of those who need it the least. Progressive advocates are well aware of this, but they also see an upside: these startups teach their workers moral lessons about sharing, community, giving and service with a smile.
I’m not sure this is going to be the problem Bulajewski thinks it will be, but he has me worried. I hope that that shine of sharing will wear off and consumers/sharers will begin to treat this as any other industry. I also think the media will soon start reporting the downside of staying on someone’s couch or getting a ride with someone who isn’t licensed. It’s like the internet, which we all thought was a nice sharing community, until it wasn’t.