privacy

L.A. police using drones to spy on citizens

law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Zachary Slobig’s “Police launch eye-in-the-sky technology above Los Angeles” (AFP: 17 June 2006):

Police launched the future of law enforcement into the smoggy Los Angeles sky in the form of a drone aircraft, bringing technology most commonly associated with combat zones to urban policing.

The unmanned aerial vehicle, which looks like a child’s remote control toy and weighs about five pounds (2.3 kilograms), is a prototype being tested by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. …

“This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone,” said Commander Sid Heal, head of the Technology Exploration Project of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “The ideal outcome for us is when this technology becomes instrumental in saving lives.”

The SkySeer would also be a helpful tool to nab burglary suspects on rooftops and to chase down suspects fleeing on foot. The drone comes equipped with low-light and infrared capabilities and can fly at speeds up to 30 miles (48 kilometers) per hour for 70 minutes. …

A small camera capable of tilt and pan operations is fixed to the underside of the drone which sends the video directly to a laptop command station. Once launched, the craft is set to fly autonomously with global positioning system (GPS) coordinates and a fixed flight pattern.

As technology improves, the drone will be outfitted with zoom capabilities. For now, the craft simply flies lower to hone in on its target. …

“The plane is virtually silent and invisible,” said Heal. “It will give us a vertical perspective that we have never had.”

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department operates a fleet of 18 helicopters, priced between three and five million dollars each. The SkySeer will cost between 25,000 and 30,000 dollars.

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4 ways to eavesdrop on telephone calls

law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “VOIP Encryption” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):

There are basically four ways to eavesdrop on a telephone call.

One, you can listen in on another phone extension. This is the method preferred by siblings everywhere. If you have the right access, it’s the easiest. While it doesn’t work for cell phones, cordless phones are vulnerable to a variant of this attack: A radio receiver set to the right frequency can act as another extension.

Two, you can attach some eavesdropping equipment to the wire with a pair of alligator clips. It takes some expertise, but you can do it anywhere along the phone line’s path — even outside the home. This used to be the way the police eavesdropped on your phone line. These days it’s probably most often used by criminals. This method doesn’t work for cell phones, either.

Three, you can eavesdrop at the telephone switch. Modern phone equipment includes the ability for someone to listen in this way. Currently, this is the preferred police method. It works for both land lines and cell phones. You need the right access, but if you can get it, this is probably the most comfortable way to eavesdrop on a particular person.

Four, you can tap the main trunk lines, eavesdrop on the microwave or satellite phone links, etc. It’s hard to eavesdrop on one particular person this way, but it’s easy to listen in on a large chunk of telephone calls. This is the sort of big-budget surveillance that organizations like the National Security Agency do best. They’ve even been known to use submarines to tap undersea phone cables.

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It’s easy to track someone using a MetroCard

business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

Law enforcement likewise views privacy laws as an impediment, especially now that it has grown accustomed to accessing location data virtually at will. Take the MetroCard, the only way for New York City commuters to pay their transit fares since the elimination of tokens. Unbeknownst to the vast majority of straphangers, the humble MetroCard is essentially a floppy disk, uniquely identified by a serial number on the flip side. Each time a subway rider swipes the card, the turnstile reads the bevy of information stored on the card’s magnetic stripe, such as serial number, value, and expiration date. That data is then relayed back to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s central computers, which also record the passenger’s station and entry time; the stated reason is that this allows for free transfers between buses and subways. (Bus fare machines communicate with MTA computers wirelessly.) Police have been taking full advantage of this location info to confirm or destroy alibis; in 2000, The Daily News estimated that detectives were requesting that roughly 1,000 MetroCard records be checked each year.

A mere request seems sufficient for the MTA to fork over the data. The authority learned its lesson back in 1997, when it initially balked at a New York Police Department request to view the E-ZPass toll records of a murder suspect; the cops wanted to see whether or not he’d crossed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge around the time of the crime. The MTA demanded that the NYPD obtain a subpoena, but then-Justice Colleen McMahon of the State Supreme Court disagreed. She ruled that “a reasonable person holds no expectation of confidentiality” when using E-ZPass on a public highway, and an administrative subpoena – a simple OK from a police higher-up – was enough to compel the MTA to hand over the goods.

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Tracking via cell phone is easy

business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

What your salesman probably failed to tell you – and may not even realize – is that an E911-capable phone can give your wireless carrier continual updates on your location. The phone is embedded with a Global Positioning System chip, which can calculate your coordinates to within a few yards by receiving signals from satellites. GPS technology gave U.S. military commanders a vital edge during Gulf War II, and sailors and pilots depend on it as well. In the E911-capable phone, the GPS chip does not wait until it senses danger, springing to life when catastrophe strikes; it’s switched on whenever your handset is powered up and is always ready to transmit your location data back to a wireless carrier’s computers. Verizon or T-Mobile can figure out which manicurist you visit just as easily as they can pinpoint a stranded motorist on Highway 59.

So what’s preventing them from doing so, at the behest of either direct marketers or, perhaps more chillingly, the police? Not the law, which is essentially mum on the subject of location-data privacy. As often happens with emergent technology, the law has struggled to keep pace with the gizmo. No federal statute is keeping your wireless provider from informing Dunkin’ Donuts that your visits to Starbucks have been dropping off and you may be ripe for a special coupon offer. Nor are cops explicitly required to obtain a judicial warrant before compiling a record of where you sneaked off to last Thursday night. Despite such obvious potential for abuse, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, the American consumer’s ostensible protectors, show little enthusiasm for stepping into the breach. As things stand now, the only real barrier to the dissemination of your daily movements is the benevolence of the telecommunications industry. A show of hands from those who find this a comforting thought? Anyone? …

THE WIRELESS INDUSTRY HAS A NAME FOR SUCH CUSTOM-TAILORED HAWKING: “location-based services,” or LBS. The idea is that GPS chips can be used to locate friends, find the nearest pizzeria, or ensure that Junior is really at the library rather than a keg party. One estimate expects LBS to be a $15 billion market by 2007, a much-needed boost for the flagging telecom sector.

That may be fine for some consumers, but what about those who’d rather opt out of the tracking? The industry’s promise is that LBS customers will have to give explicit permission for their data to be shared with third parties. This is certainly in the spirit of the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999, which anticipated that all cellphone carriers will feature E911 technology by 2006. The law stipulated that E911 data – that is, an individual’s second-by-second GPS coordinates – could only be used for nonemergency purposes if “express prior authorization” was provided by the consumer. …

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Kids forcibly sent to re-education programs

business, education, law / /

From Nadya Labi’s “Want Your Kid to Disappear?” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2004):

RICK STRAWN IS AN EX-COP WHO STARTED HIS COMPANY in 1988 to help police officers find off-duty work guarding construction sites. Ten years later, he was asked by a member of his United Methodist church to transport the churchgoer’s son to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica. The school is run by the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, a company headquartered in Utah that owns eight schools in the United States and abroad, including Louis, Jr.’s destination. …

Three years ago, Strawn escorted Valerie Ann Heron, a 17-year-old from Montgomery, Ala., to Tranquility Bay. The school is the most hardcore in the WWASP system, the one to which students are sent when they repeatedly cause trouble at other schools. …

The world according to Strawn is based on choices and consequences. The world according to WWASP is designed to reinforce the same principle. Students enter Casa by the Sea at the first of six levels. To advance, they have to earn points through good behavior and schoolwork. Until they reach level three, which takes an average of three months, they can communicate with the outside world only through letters to their parents, which the school monitors. After that, they can talk on the phone to their parents but no one else.

Casa costs nearly $30,000 for a year – as much as a year’s tuition at Harvard – but offers no traditional academic instruction. Instead the schoolwork is self-paced; the students sit at tables with a workbook and take a test on a section when they decide they’re ready. They can retake the same test as many times as necessary to achieve an 80 percent passing grade. According to the Casa parent handbook, the school does not ensure that “the student will even receive any credits” or that the teachers who monitor the study sessions will have U.S. credentials. The school does not track how many of its students go on to high school or college. “You’re not going to have a teacher riding your back,” Dalton told Louis. “It’s all independent study. I just read the module, and did the test. I finished class in a week. That’s how easy it is.”

Students spend more time studying themselves than any other subject. They write daily reflections in response to self-help tapes and videos such as Tony Robbins’s Personal Power, You Can Choose, and Price Tag of Sex. They answer questions like “What feelings/emotions did I experience today and how did I choose to respond?”

Students also attend, and eventually staff, self-help seminars. The entry-level seminar, called Discovery, encourages participants to “learn to interrupt unconscious mental and emotional cycles which tend to sabotage results.” Kelly Lauritsen participated in Discovery at Casa in 2000 and said she was encouraged to hit the walls with rolled towels to release her anger. The price of tuition includes versions of these seminars for parents. Like Oprah on speed, sessions run nonstop from morning until midnight. Many parents and kids say they benefit from the self-analysis. “I didn’t realize that I had so much anger inside,” the 14-year-old girl whom Strawn transported in November wrote to her mother. …

Strawn told Louis that the hardest thing about Casa would be abiding by the school’s intricate system of discipline. “It’s not the big rules that get you. It’s all the little rules,” Strawn said. Casa docks students, according to its handbook, for telling “war stories” about inappropriate experiences, for being unkind to each other, and for making “negative statements about the School, the staff, the country, or other students.”

“There’s a whole page of rules,” said Shannon Eierman, who attended Casa last year. “That page is divided into sections of categories, into different codes, and a million subcategories. You could be there forever and the next day and learn a new rule.”

Students at Casa who commit “Category 5 infractions” can be punished with an “intervention,” for example, which is defined as being left alone in a room. Students say that the punishment can last for weeks, though Casa insists that the maximum penalty is three days. “I had to sit with crossed legs in a closet for three days,” said Kaori Gutierrez, who left Casa in 2001. Interventions may be used to punish out-of-control behavior, drug use, and escape attempts. But they’re also the way the school handles “self-inflicted injuries,” which can range from cracked knuckles to self-mutilation with pens or paper clips to an attempted suicide.

At the root of this long list of punishable violations is “manipulation,” which includes lying or exaggerating. Strawn repeatedly uses the word to dismiss a kid’s behavior – it’s the way he said Valerie Heron acted the day before her suicide. In the WWASP universe that he inhabits, manipulation is a term of art that refers to just about anything a teen does or says that the staff doesn’t like.

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iSee: online map of CCTVs in Manhattan

law, politics, security, tech in changing society / /

From Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

One extralegal solution is a project called iSee. Launched several years ago, iSee is an online interactive map of the locations of surveillance cameras in Manhattan. To use iSee, you simply open the map of Manhattan and double-click on your point of departure and your destination. After a few moments of computation, iSee generates the “path of least surveillance.”

iSee can be accessed through the website of the organization which created it, the so-called Institute of Applied Autonomy. IAA is a collective of artists, engineers, and scientists who design technologies for the “burgeoning market” of “cultural insurrection.” The organization presents itself as a tech-savvy civil libertarian answer to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a shadowy R&D wing of the Pentagon. DARPA has recently been in the news for developing the Terrorist Information Awareness project, headed by John Poindexter, which would monitor the everyday transactions of American citizens. Whereas DARPA uses what IAA calls “tools of repression” to take your autonomy away, IAA answers with another set of tools that are intended to give you your autonomy back. …

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In Britain, you can see footage of you captured by CCTV

business, law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

In London, a city even more intensively scrutinized by closed-circuit television cameras than New York, citizens can at least retrieve copies of footage taken of them through a provision in Britain’s Data Protection Act. Americans have no such legal recourse. …

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Matching identities across databases, anonymously

security, technology / /

From MIT Technology Review‘s’ “Blindfolding Big Brother, Sort of“:

In 1983, entrepreneur Jeff Jonas founded Systems Research and Development (SRD), a firm that provided software to identify people and determine who was in their circle of friends. In the early 1990s, the company moved to Las Vegas, where it worked on security software for casinos. Then, in January 2005, IBM acquired SRD and Jonas became chief scientist in the company’s Entity Analytic Solutions group.

His newest technology, which allows entities such as government agencies to match an individual found in one database to that same person in another database, is getting a lot of attention from governments, banks, health-care providers, and, of course, privacy advocates. Jonas claims that his technology is as good at protecting privacy as it as at finding important information. …

JJ: The technique that we have created allows the bank to anonymize its customer data. When I say “anonymize,” I mean it changes the name and address and date of birth, or whatever data they have about an identity, into a numeric value that is nonhuman readable and nonreversible. You can’t run the math backwards and compute from the anonymized value what the original input value was. …

Here’s the scenario: The government has a list of people we should never let into the country. It’s a secret. They don’t want people in other countries to know. And the government tends to not share this list with corporate America. Now, if you have a cruise line, you want to make sure you don’t have people getting on your boat who shouldn’t even be in the United States in the first place. Prior to the U.S. Patriot Act, the government couldn’t go and subpoena 100,000 records every day from every company. Usually, the government would have to go to a cruise line and have a subpoena for a record. Section 215 [of the Patriot Act] allows the government to go to a business entity and say, “We want all your records.” Now, the Fourth Amendment, which is “search and seizure,” has a legal test called “reasonable and particular.” Some might argue that if a government goes to a cruise line and says, “Give us all your data,” it is hard to envision that this would be reasonable and particular.

But what other solution do they have? There was no other solution. Our Anonymous Resolution technology would allow a government to take its secret list and anonymize it, allow a cruise line to anonymize their passenger list, and then when there’s a match it would tell the government: “record 123.” So they’d look it up and say, “My goodness, it’s Majed Moqed.” And it would tell them which record to subpoena from which organization. Now it’s back to reasonable and particular. ….

TR: How is this is based on earlier work you did for Las Vegas casinos?

JJ: The ability to figure out if two people are the same despite all the natural variability of how people express their identity is something we really got a good understanding of assisting the gaming industry. We also learned how people try to fabricate fake identities and how they try to evade systems. It was learning how to do that at high speed that opened the door to make this next thing possible. Had we not solved that in the 1990s, we would not have been able to conjure up a method to do anonymous resolution.

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Brin’s Transparent Society explained, briefly

commonplace book, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s “Big Brother Logs On“:

In his 1998 book The Transparent Society, which is well known in the privacy advocacy community, science fiction author and technology watcher David Brin argues that society inevitably will have to choose between two versions of ubiquitous surveillance: in one, only the rich and powerful use and control the system to their own advantage; in the second, more democratic future, the watchers can also be watched. Brin concedes that the latter version would mean everybody’s laundry hung out in public view, but the transparency would at least be mutual. Rent a porn video and your wife knows it; but if she drives to your best buddy’s house four times a week while you’re at the office, you’ll know that also.

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Face recognition software as an example of “function creep”

security, social software, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s’ “Creepy Functions“:

Consider one example of function creep. The Electoral Commission of Uganda has retained Viisage Technology to implement a face recognition system capable of enrolling 10 million voters in 60 days. The goal is to reduce voter registration fraud. But Woodward notes that the system might also be put to work fingering political opponents of the regime. And Uganda probably isn’t the first country that springs to mind when someone says “due process” or “civil rights.”

From Technology Review‘s’ “Big Brother Logs On“:

Take the fact that the faces of a large portion of the driving population are becoming digitized by motor vehicles agencies and placed into databases, says Steinhardt. It isn’t much of a stretch to extend the system to a Big Brother-like nationwide identification and tracking network. Or consider that the Electoral Commission of Uganda has retained Viisage Technology to implement a “turnkey face recognition system” capable of enrolling 10 million voter registrants within 60 days. By generating a database containing the faceprint of every one of the country’s registered voters-and combining it with algorithms able to scour all 10 million images within six seconds to find a match-the commission hopes to reduce voter registration fraud. But once such a database is compiled, notes John Woodward, a former CIA operations officer who managed spies in several Asian countries and who’s now an analyst with the Rand Corporation, it could be employed for tracking and apprehending known or suspected political foes. Woodward calls that “function creep.”

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