3 Degrees of LinkedIn Separation from the Military-Industrial-Surveillance State | Hacker News Reader

3 Degrees of LinkedIn Separation from the Military-Industrial-Surveillance State

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86 pointsdanso34 comments

An alternate take on this from the title: like any industry, homeland security (for example) is likely to be a tightly knit cluster of people -- you generally network on LinkedIn (and in life) with people in your own industry.

Now at even two degrees away, a single tenuous connection from the author to this cluster would instantly put the bulk of that cluster into the author's "extended network", and lead to the scary visualization shown. This connection could literally be a recruiter connecting to two essentially random people. At higher degrees of separation, the probability of finding such a path increases dramatically, to the point of almost certainty.

In other words, don't use these so-called "extended networks" for any serious analysis, and don't always trust tree visualizations of social networks.

I feel like your comment goes so far and then stops short of the key takeaway from this.

From below >>The NSA reported using 3 hops for data dumps from their bulk surveillance store.

> >The NSA reported using 3 hops for data dumps from their bulk surveillance store.

I'm not sure what this means, and you appear to be referencing a comment in this HN thread. I'd imagine that if an entity uses a hardware splitter to intercept all traffic, the number of alleged hops used in a network traversal isn't as important.

Ok no worries, it was quite a while ago that the article came out (I think around some of the early Snowden leaks). It that claimed that the NSA used a 3 hop rule to establish a 'targets' network. They claimed to only use 3 hops to protect the privacy and constitutional rights of US citizens ie 'this is not mass surveillance guys, we promise'. (paraphrasing from memory of course)

To the authors point, 2 hops could just about be anyone.

To your point, 2 hops could be a very tenuous link.

If you put both points together you get effectively mass surveillance of just about anyone whilst still claiming to be on the right side of the law.

Thank you, that makes sense.

What % of people on LinkedIn are NOT within 3 degrees of separation from you?

Facebook users averaged 3.74 degrees of separation in 2011: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-15844230

Hi all - I made this. In case anyone is interested, I wrote up a statement about it here: http://greetingsfellowalienatedsubjectoflatecapitalism.com/#...

How would this compare to a diagram of degrees of separation from other skill-sets?

I'm not sure...the author's projects page (http://lav.io/) is full of politically satirical/subversive work, such as "CSPAN-5: autogenerated supercuts of CSPAN videos" and "Big Data Pawn Shop: leaked NSA documents printed on merchandise" and my favorite, "Yelp Prison Review Faxbot"...so it wasn't likely something he investigated.

OTOH I've been fascinated that these are even endorsement categories and of all the subcategories beneath them...not shocked...just surprised because the endorsement tags I always focus on on LinkedIn are things like "Ruby on Rails" or "Front-end development"

I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that the endorsement categories were not a whitelisted set and that you could endorse someone for basically anything.

I've had a college endorse me for "dairy", "laughter yoga", and javascript. You can endorse anyone for anything.

https://xkcd.com/1138/

A third degree of separation on LinkedIn isn't really that meaningful in my experience (e.g. according to LinkedIn, Barack Obama is a third degree connection of mine). Whilst it put stuff like the NSA's three hops rule in context, it doesn't really reveal anything notable AFAICT.

I'd like to see an anonymous representation of that first degree of connection. Maybe the number of empty boxes leading to that second degree. Or is this information implied in the grouping (i.e. this is all from only five of his connections)? I can't tell.

The NSA reported using 3 hops for data dumps from their bulk surveillance store.

Does the author suggest that having these skills is bad somehow? I don't understand — what's the implication here?

The NSA uses a "three-degree of separation" rule to determine whether your communications are "fair game" for interception and surveillance. As this exercise shows, three degrees of separation is a very broad criterion, and can be used as a justification to intercept almost anyone's communications, whether they are involved with terrorism or not.

Never heard of it before, thanks for the info.

http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/07/nsa-admits-it-analyz...

Best source I could find, unfortunately, couldn't find the testimony itself in text.

He specifically does not pass a judgement on them. Just that the military-industrial-surveillance state has a banality of professionalism to it.

Hm — how does the word "state" enter the equation?

I feel like I'm in a not-so-secret racist meeting: everybody is having a specific stereotype in mind and is barely hiding an understanding smirk, but still not saying anything out loud.

Anyone know how this was made? As I understand it is not so easy to scrape LinkedIn at scale.

Hey - author here. I used casperjs to do the scraping. It was a pain in the ass and I got temporarily banned a few times...

I tried this last year and was blocked after the scraper visiting 500 profiles for 24 hrs. not sure if tarpitting would have allowed more than 500 in 24 hrs. requests were spread with a random sleep of 1-5 seconds.

It would be nice to see the overlap between these, and to be able to see the same chart for my own 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections.

With enough people working on population surveillance the desire for self-preservation alone helps keeping the system in place. Voter incentives, economic incentives of firms (many are contractors), etc.

Still a way to go until it's on par with China's (rumored) ~2 million[1] though.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-24396957

If it's the only half ass solution we have to prevent the next Boston Bombing or Paris Attacks what else can be done?

Until we find better solutions its just par for the course along with comments likes yours.

Norway had a terrible terror attack a few years ago. They didn't opt for more surveillance.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/27/norway-terror-a...

Norway also has a fraction of the population and has a history of very low violence. It's easy to say this attack was an outlier considering the long history of non-violence in their country.

Norway isn't a really high target on any terrorist hit list either. One of the reasons for mass surveillance is the idea if you have a massive population its the only way to keep tabs on the bad guys.

This of course begs the question how the San Bernardino shooters got away with their attack if the NSA was properly doing their job and mass surveillance actually worked; which it clearly didn't in the California case.

The non-violent history of Norway is true.

Still, I think this misplaced fear (which many feel) is what's tricking us. If you dig a bit, there are examples in the other direction.

===

# More likely to be crushed by furniture then killed by a terrorist:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/2...

# Guns kill many more than do terrorists (similar argument):

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9446193/gun-deaths-aids-war-ter...

# Spending isn't allocated to the common causes of death:

http://i1.wp.com/thinkbynumbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/...

# Airport security 'causing' unnecessary deaths

Slow air travel due to security is shifting (some proportion of) travelers to cars, where accidents are more common.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-18/how-airport-...

===

I could go on.

Yes, terrorism is an issue that should be dealt with. But it should be handled rationally and with proportionality.

>The non-violent history of Norway is true.

I disagree, based on what I've read about Vikings. Those were some pretty brutal people.

The disturbingly common "this is a solution, so it must the right solution" crap would be more convincing if we actually had a problem in the first place.

"If" being the operative keyword there. Yes, if that was the case. If this had anything to do with anyone being concerned about terrorism and other atrocities, step one would be to not commit them, step two would be to not fund people to commit them, and THEN step three would be something, and "trample on the human rights of everybody on the planet to prevent some violations of human rights" is not even in the running for that. Good we cleared that up, this should lessen the number of "comments like yours" in the future, no?

If you were in charge what would you do today if a report came across your desk that a city was going to be attacked next week?

Things aren't black and white. Obama shows he understands all the nuances of the complex world we live in and from the looks of things the world has just grown more complex despite that understanding.

Just look at how hard he has found it, to get what you might call the "common sense/simple" solutions implemented. And he has had the time.

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