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Posts tagged ‘Data Mining’

President Obama mining Facebook, Twitter to predict crimes


Controversial program may offer insight into Verizon scandal

author-image Aaron Klein http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/obama-mining-facebook-twitter-to-predict-crimes/
Aaron Klein is WND’s senior staff reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief. He also hosts “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio. Follow Aaron on Twitter and Facebook.
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Clues to the federal government’s reason for collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers may be found in a recently unearthed 2010 project seeking to predict criminal activity using vast quantities of data on citizens mined from social network websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

In February, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the Massachusetts-based multinational corporation, Raytheon – the world’s fifth largest defense contractor – had developed a “Google for Spies” operation.

Herald reporter Ryan Gallagher wrote that Raytheon had “secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites” like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.

The software is called RIOT, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology.

Raytheon told the Herald it has not sold RIOT to any clients but admitted that, in 2010, it had shared the program’s software technology with the U.S. government as part of a “joint research and development effort … to help build a national security system capable of analyzing ‘trillions of entities’ from cyberspace.”

In April, RIOT was reportedly showcased at a U.S. government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified innovations, where it was listed under the category “big data – analytics, algorithms.”

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, argued that major ethical dilemmas ensue although RIOT apparently utilizes only publicly available information from companies like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

“The government has no business rooting around people’s social network postings – even those that are voluntarily publicly posted – unless it has specific, individualized suspicion that person is involved in wrongdoing,” Stanley wrote on the ACLU blog.

Stanley wrote that among the many problems with government large-scale analytics of social network information “is the prospect that government agencies will blunderingly use these techniques to tag, target and watchlist people coughed up by programs such as RIOT, or to target them for further invasions of privacy based on incorrect inferences.”

“The chilling effects of such activities,” he concluded, “while perhaps gradual, would be tremendous.”

Ginger McCall, attorney and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Open Government program, told NBC in February, “This sort of software allows the government to surveil everyone.

“It scoops up a bunch of information about totally innocent people. There seems to be no legitimate reason to get this, other than that they can.”

As for RIOT’s ability to help catch terrorists, McCall called it “a lot of white noise.”

The London Guardian further obtained a four-minute video that shows how the RIOT software uses photographs on social networks. The images, sometimes containing latitude and longitude details, are “automatically embedded by smartphones within so-called ‘exif header data.’

 RIOT pulls out this information, analyzing not only the photographs posted by individuals, but also the location where these images were taken,” the Guardian reported.

Such sweeping data collection and analysis to predict future activity may further explain some of what the government is doing with the phone records of millions of Verizon customers.

In March 2006, the New York Times first reported the National Security Agency was utilizing phone records to search for patterns.

“In the increasingly popular language of network theory, individuals are “nodes,” and relationships and interactions form the “links” binding them together; by mapping those connections, network scientists try to expose patterns that might not otherwise be apparent,” reported the Times.

In February 2006, more than a year after Obama was sworn as a U.S. senator, it was revealed the “supposedly defunct” Total Information Awareness data-mining and profiling program had been acquired by the NSA.

The Total Information Awareness program was first announced in 2002 as an early effort to mine large volumes of data for hidden connections.

With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott

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Analysis: covert collection of phone records could be devastating for Barack Obama


The Obama administration will be bracing itself for a torrent of hostile questions this morning following the apparent revelation that the National Security Agency has been data-mining the phone records of tens of millions of ordinary Americans.

The difficulty for Mr Obama is that even if the NSA is actually doing nothing different than it did for George W Bush

Not to be confused with eavesdropping, or bugging the phones of those suspected of conspiring to commit a terrorist or criminal offence, the top secret court order published by The Guardianappears to show that the NSA has been trawling the anonymous ‘metadata’ of potentially billions of phone-calls.

On the one hand, American might take comfort that the ‘internals’ of their phone conversations – ie the voices themselves – are not being routinely recorded, but on the other, it seems from this leak that potentially everyone with a phone is under some form of surveillance in the USA.

Studies have shown that while anonymous, the ‘metadata’ – records of location data, call duration, unique identifiers – can provide a surprising amount of information, surprisingly quickly when zeroed in on by investigators.

For Mr Obama – a president who prided himself on his liberal credentials – this leak is a potentially devastating revelation since it exposes him to attack on two fronts – from both the libertarian Right and the liberal Left.

Already the administration has been hammered over its aggressive prosecution of leakers, including what appeared to be an attempt to criminalise a Fox News journalist, James Rosen, for working a source to obtain a leak from the State Department about North Korea.

That story caused the New York Times – usually a reliable friend of the Obama administration – to write a seething editorial accusing the Department of Justice of over-reaching, and using its powers to send a “chilling” message to the media.

It is not clear how wide the NSA data-mining project goes, it’s effectiveness as a counter-terrorism tool in identifying potential terrorist or criminal cells or – indeed – whether it has been used for any other purposes.

It appears from previous reports that the NSA’s data-mining operation is not new, and has long been suspected – but this is the first clear-cut proof, in the shape of a highly unusual leak from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Service Court (Fisa), that the practice is occurring.

A report in USA Today newspaper from 2006, quoting anonymous intelligence officials, alleged that the NSA been “secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans” and that the agency was using the data to “analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity”.

Since September 11 and the passing of the 2001 Patriot Act, the American public has accepted a great deal of inconvenience and intrusion in the name of national security. The publication of this court order will re-open the debate on how far the security services’ writ should run.

Politically, the difficulty for Mr Obama is that even if the NSA is actually doing nothing different than it did for George W Bush, the American public – particularly on the liberal left – had believed that Mr Obama’s administration represented a fundamental departure from the excesses of the Bush years.

Now, with the continued debate over the use of drones, the failure to close Guantanamo, the ultra-aggressive prosecution of leaks even to the point, perhaps, of muzzling a free press – the questions from the public and the media are starting to weigh down on the Obama White House.

Already last night, within hours of publication, civil liberties groups who have long warned about the extent of secret surveillance, were jumping on the revelations.

“This confirms what we had long suspected,” says Cindy Cohn, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization that has accused the government of operating a secret dragnet surveillance program told the Washington Post.

“I don’t think Congress thought it was authorizing dragnet surveillance” when it passed the Patriot Act, Ms Cohn said, “I don’t think Americans think that’s OK. I would be shocked if the majority of Congressmen thought it’s okay.” Over the next few days and weeks, expect a fierce and polarizing debate over just what Americans do feel is acceptable, in the name of their national security.

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