Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity
mashable.com
mashable.com
Which is why I stopped using Facebook.
I also stopped using Twitter to tweet. I still use it to follow news sources, I just don't actively tweet. I did that after the NYPD won a court case to see all the private messages you send on Twitter.
I also don't comment much at all on blogs, and social sites like this one or Reddit anymore. (I use to be a top 10 contributor over at Reddit. At least that is what some metric said a few years ago when someone listed the top ten most popular usernames. That account is deleted now)
I am slowly pulling out. I have a deep distrust of the current surveillance state in the United States. I remember reading a story about a guy who posted a quote from fight club on his Facebook status and a few hours later in the middle of the night the NYPD was busting in his door and he spent 3 years in legal limbo over it. (Might have been NJ police anyways, red flags)
You start piecing together these things, and you start to realize that your thoughts and ruminations about life, the universe, and the mundane, can be used against you at any moment and can completely strip you of your liberty and freedom, and any happiness you may have had.
I am gonna be completely honest, I am scared to express myself any longer on the Internet in any fashion. I don't trust it any longer. I don't trust the police, I don't trust the FBI, I don't trust the federal government, and I also don't trust, nor have faith, in the justice system in the United States.
I distrust everything they do. And while we like to think that other sites are not as bad, I was recently censored on Quora for asking about why a post was censored on Reddit.
They threw some "against policy" bullshit at me, and Marc Bodnick attempted to appear sympathetic and that his hands were tied and he didnt like the policy either - but it was a BS response.
They removed my question asking why the top LIBOR story on reddit was removed - I asked if Yishan Wong was directly responsible for such censorship etc...
After berating Marc for the BS excuse they stopped replying to me.
EVERY single thing you type online is viewed by the NSAs terrorbots.
Anyone that thinks anything is private online is fooling themselves.
http://www.quora.com/Reddit/Why-has-this-link-on-Biggest-fin...
It's time to create an underground data haven in Kinakuta--the Crypt.
Evidence? Did you program these NSA bots or something?
> Anyone that thinks anything is private online is fooling themselves.
No, they just don't know any better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy If you want your messages to be heard by limited parties, make it so. "My friends are too stupid to know how to use any form of encryption" is not an excuse, and might cause you to pause and consider whether you want to share anything important with such friends in the first place.
https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel
Encryption is great, as long as the people you don't want to hear it can't decrypt it. Given the NSA's recent moves to build up computing power, and the way Moore's law works, your encrypted communications today are fodder for review tomorrow.
It's easy to future-proof your encryption, even in the face of exponential increases in computing power. The biggest danger to encryption systems that rely on integer factoring (i.e. RSA) right now is feasible quantum computing, but there are schemes that don't rely on factoring so there's hope on that front. For the trivial stuff I bother encrypting, I'm more worried about, in increasing order, being given the choice of decrypting something or getting shot or sent to prison for life (fortunately we have some precedent in the US and elsewhere against this), being tortured for a while without knowing why before being asked to decrypt something, and being tortured without having any information but being unable to convince the torturer of that.
Act 1 here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r...
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most
honest of men, I will find something in them which will
hang him. -- Cardinal RichelieuThink about it this way, the efforts to convict Jeff Skilling (yes, of Enron) of "Honest Services Fraud" would make reading HN from work a federal felony. Note that after the book was published, the Supreme Court threw out Skilling's conviction for honest services fraud on the basis of vagueness. But many other issues remain.
For example, I design my billing cycles on the principle of minimizing invoices of greater than $10k. Is this a federal felony? By some interpretations, it might be. Part of the reason is I don't want lots of my payments from customers being reported to the federal government. Part of the reason is that larger numbers of smaller invoices make cash flow a little easier to manage. Part of it is that I have found that banks don't like seeing a lot of large transactions and therefore my life is easier vis a vis the banks if I keep those to a minimum. But I think such statutes will have to be read narrowly.
>I am gonna be completely honest, I am scared to express myself any longer on the Internet in any fashion. I don't trust it any longer. I don't trust the police, I don't trust the FBI, I don't trust the federal government, and I also don't trust, nor have faith, in the justice system in the United States.
The internet is for marketing yourself, not expressing yourself.
I'm just old enough to remember when the exact opposite was trued. Terribly saddening to see how that's changed.
I moved out of the country four years ago for this very reason. The rule of law is gone. It is unsafe to live there.
You must leave. The time is now. This is not a drill. You are not overreacting.
You must leave.
I'm openly and viscerally critical of the government, politicians, etc etc etc on many social media outlets, phone calls, emails, other communications yet I have not been impacted in any way. I have not had any of my rights restricted, abridged, etc.
So either I'm the luckiest guy in the "police state", or you're overreacting.
It's a TSA-state where there is a massive over-reaction to bureaucratic automated scanning of communications.
Post some SMS/Tweet/facebook update with a quote that sounds to an automated script like a terrorist threat. (eg a line from Fightclub or a Clash lyric) and watch the reaction.
Even if the police bursting down your door manage to not accidentally shoot you - hopefully you are white and rich - expect to be dragged through the courts and have your life ruined because THEY can't be wrong.
Allow me to be blunt. Your concerns are overstated.
reddit.com/r/igotout
I never really understood this line. I can say with pretty much 100% certainty that I have broken no laws, no matter how small, at any time within the past week. Traffic, what have you.
It wasn't difficult either. You sacrifice a tiny bit of convenience, but honestly? It's worth it to have a clean conscience.
Reading that book outloud to your children violates the T&C
You do calculate and pay local sales tax on anything you order from out of state?
Company's problem, not mine.
>Reading that book outloud to your children violates the T&C
Just because you put it in a contract doesn't make it legally enforceable.
>You do calculate and pay local sales tax on anything you order from out of state?
As a matter of fact...
I can say with pretty much 100% certainty that you're wrong (at least if you're in the US).
I'm not saying that you're lying, let alone that you're intentionally doing wrong. It's just that the web of law reaches everywhere and it's almost impossible to not trip over it.
IMHO most of these laws shouldn't exist but that's just me.
The contrarian view would be that most people don't care if they trip over it.
What we need is an abstraction layer on top of social networks. No matter what their TOS, they do not own my friends or my conversations with my friends. I have no qualms at all about having some other service handle my friendships and conversations in a way I deem appropriate.
We need to pry Facebook's greasy hands from our throats before it's too late. At one point they were cute. Then they were pleasantly time-wasting. Now they're crossing over the line firmly into evil territory.
http://freedomboxfoundation.org/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgu8NUm5Zxk
I don't think hope is enough, actually. The Freedom Box needs volunteers desperately. Everything from code to user interface to ideas.
So I suppose my hope is: I really, really hope more people get involved.
After all, it is we the people who ultimately are creating the thing.
---
It started innocently enough. Everyone is on it. Everyone. In the more than 20 years since it was founded - and now - daily life just could not be managed without it. Sure, it started innocently enough. Connect with your friends, post your pics, keep up with the fam. Yeah, that was then.
It wasn't too long before they started adding features. Adding value they called it. Extending your circle. Enabling you they'd say. Yeah, in the same way a spiders web is beautiful. The pattern and symmetry, glistening like shiny gossamer art. Its beauty pulls you in - you don't realize at first as you touch it, that it sticks. No, more than sticks - you become imbued with it. The more you move it wraps around you, encasing you... entombing you. For the data-mining black widow to come and suck the marketable value right out of you, your connections... every aspect of your life is now a product.
Classified, organized, tagged, sorted, tracked, pegged, followed, poked, monetized, labeled... owned is what you are. A commodity. A small spec among 3.5 billion in the user base of the book.
That's what it was these days... just simply 'the book'.
Everyone knows - everyone is aware. They are all in the book. Not even a page, or a word either... more like a letter. A single letter. An iconographic digital hologram of the total sum of your parts - all wrapped up real nice in a uniform singular profitable little package called your user profile. Displayed and viewed and consumed and tracked billions of times over. With more than thirty trillion page views per month, the cancerous blue and white digital encapsulation of the human soul was now blazoned across innumerable screens as nearly half the worlds population interacted on the book - more than 20% of the worlds population on the book at any given moment.
A study, one of the countless to be sure, said that now more than 90% of real human interactions occurred through the book. What does that even mean anymore... real? Real human interactions? Through the book? how is that even possible. It was no wonder that in the last few years the backlash has switched to resisting this unexpected strangle-hold on the human condition. Most never saw it coming... happily going along with every new feature update, privacy change, "enhancement". MZ was repeating himself a lot these days... except his frame of reference had gotten bigger... along with his security detail.... Where years ago, the book was likened to that which only came along to change humans interactions every 100 years... now his statements were 10 fold. MZ thinks of himself as the embodiment of the singularity... whatever that means. Some fucking fantasy of a long dead cybervisionary that couldn't recognize the makings of our current prison I'm sure. Fuck him.
Looking around looks a lot more like binary slavery than any form of singularity. None of our old problems have been solved - in fact the book has only made things worse. After it became a "platform for governance and outreach" we, people like - those who really see, knew. We knew what this meant. Game fucking over. This era of hyper connectivity and ultra social awareness was supposed to usher in some sort of Utopian orgasm -- one in which MZ would be carried on the shoulders of the masses to stand next to fantastical human saviors like Jesus. Fictional allusions to stellar bodies be damned!
The only problem is that most of the world is too busy. Feeding their attention into the black hole of the book to notice... or care I guess.
With ubiquitous access thanks to the assimilation of the largest global fiber network a few years ago, the book was now able to offer complete and total "free" access via the acquired goog-net.
Years ago, when Athena rolled out - it was a huge success. Welcomed into every neighborhood - direct, very high speed fiber access in every home was quickly made into a "right". The model was seen as our manifest destiny, held in a 62-micron translucent hair that fed us with more 1' and 0's to each person in a single day than the entire digital output of the globe in 1999. Such an umbilical cannot be bad right!
The only problem is we misjudged the direction of the flow! Now, with goog-net reaching everywhere, but the book being the only lens into the tubes -- our minds are warped. We are a most technically advanced - yet wholly dependent child-like civilization.
A mutant.
If its not on the platform. Not "in the book" they say -- how can it be trusted - how could it succeed? How can you expect to be relevant?
HOW CAN IT NOT BE RELEVANT!
Slaves! All of them!
This is why we act! This is what is needed. Who are we? Who the fuck were we? Not this! Surely not this. It is time.... We take action now. Rewrite this so called book.
Diaspora has the right idea. The danger of Facebook is that it is a monolith. If you can't see that Facebook is big brother, then your eyes are not open. It is literally that. By decentralizing our social networks, making everything opt-in, and controlled by small, independent, groups of people, we can effectively mitigate the corruption that is inevitable with such a monolithic and opaque service like Facebook.
I thought the whole thing was adhoc and confusing. Anyone who saw the comment could easily see that it was a joke. Also, if it wasn't a joke, why is FB calling her and not someone from law enforcement?
Would love it if someone from FB here on HN could comment.
I work for Facebook's User Operations team and, as the Reuters article says, this specific tool targets the (thankfully) rare cases of adults trying to use the site for the purpose of grooming kids.
We use advanced technical systems to specifically identify grooming situations and strive for a low false positive rate. We have strong internal controls around these tools to prevent misuse or abuse, and stringent guidelines for the way we cooperate with law enforcement.
For whatever it's worth, I have been at Facebook for several years, and I am so amazed every time we're able to help a child avert an absolute worst-case scenario. These cases are rare, but they do happen, and I'm grateful we have the tools necessary to keep the worst of the worst from unfolding in the real world.
"Think of the children" doesn't rationalize even one wrongly accused person - especially in today's society where an accusation is enough to completely ruin ones life.
And be serious. Getting asked a question from Facebook is hardly going to ruin someone's life is it now ?
in case of law enforcement, the only acceptable false positive rate is zero.
Laughable. It does when Facebook are going out of their way to read something that is absolutely none of their business. You can easily obtain zero false positives by not turning anything over the the police.
A false negative could ruin the child's life just as easily, so I suspect most parents might think that's more important. It's not necessary to choose either "privacy uber alles" or "think of the children". As with most things in life, there's likely a good balance somewhere between the extremes.
For example? A child being preyed on by a pedophile? What would stop that from happening in real life? Maybe we should set up cameras every five feet since obviously if we could stop it (no matter how immoral we have to act to do so) we have an obligation to, right?
People have obviously found that online fora are perfect to groom children, because you can approach a child far easier than doing so in a playground. You can also repeatedly try with different children without your likeness being plastered on a wall somewhere. Since it's an obvious target, and checking it can be automated, why not police it in a balanced way? Again, you only see one side of this.
Similarly, in real life if you had a cheap, automated way of highlighting interactions that have been proved to have a higher chance of leading to children being molested while still balancing that with the human rights of the adult, most would find a balance between "do nothing" and "be hysterical". We don't have such an automated mechanism, and I'm sure your cameras-every-five-metres idea is on the hysterical side of balance, so even using it is obviously a straw man argument. That doesn't discount more rational approaches for those who have more than one principle in mind.
Anyone who argues that everyone should be spied upon in order to protect a minority is an idiot who does not understand the concept of freedom. Privacy is a right.
Example? Because it sounds like justification bullshit.
Facebook's mass wiretapping and analysis of its users private communication seems almost like the post office scanning each and ever letter and postcard in the vague hope of finding some keywords related to bomb, terror and of cause "children". I wonder how long it is going to take until Google is going to send automated notifications to my local police station when I'm going to start googeling some water bomb tutorials for the summer.
But hey, auto-saving history without prompting you is worth it, right? (Also figuring out what to advertise to a user.)
http://gizmodo.com/349308/verizon-att-respect-your-sms-priva...
That question has a complex answer. In short: not really.
Unfortunately, I know a little too much about phone networks to have a representative answer. I know very little about Facebook, except that its users usually attribute to it more privacy than it really offers. Trying to understand why that is is the reason for my question.
1) The communications were inadvertently obtained and 2) The communication appears to pertain to commission of a crime.
I don't think you can classify this as inadvertent. So I wonder if Facebook can be sued.
There is one way to find out. Create a decoy post, hear from law enforcement, and sue Facebook.
Generating deliberate false-positive inducing noise in communications deemed to be private between two or more individuals who know one another should be protected as free speech. To argue otherwise would be the equivalent of prosecuting an individual for yelling "Fire" in their own home among friends and stating that such an act is a clear and present danger to the US.
IMHO automated cooperative manufactured reasonable doubt will probably be one of the last bastions of civil liberties in a surveillance society.
There was this interesting article on this idea of terahertz lasers in airports. I think these machines are great because they are programmable and specific. You can program them to look just for explosives and this reduces the search issues significantly. But what of the fact that they would mean the TSA might be Constitutionally barred from looking for drugs? Would this retard adoption?
I think if you want to show you are doing a great job at law enforcement and minimize the warrant requirement, you want to have as many false positives as the courts will let you get away with. "Yeah they only found a few oz of pot, but they had probable cause to believe he was a sexual predator, so the evidence is admissible."
Berating the legislature to eliminate as many unenforceable laws as possible seems like a better way to make law enforcement look more effective.
- The noise itself may be interpreted as incriminating. If someone wants to make trouble for you, they can, based on the noise. Yes, you have plausible deniability, but this costs time and money.
- Fuzzing signals is tricky. If someone's snooping for unspecified suspicious behavior, noise may cloud things. If they're looking for specific data to tie you to people, places, times, events, etc., there are very powerful tools to cut through the things you're not interested to just the stuff that's relevant. Methods of masking printer identification marks suffer a similar problem.
- Even if you're generating pure random white noise, under a regime compelling decryption on request, you've now got to make the case that noise is in fact noise, and not very securely encrypted data. Again at a cost of time/money in the face of someone who wants to make trouble for you.
Mashable quotes Facebook as stating “where appropriate and to the extent required by law to ensure the safety of the people who use Facebook"
Can anyone speak to whether or not proactive scanning could possible be required by law? It seems entirely unlikely, but IANAL.
I hope you see where I am going with this...
[1] http://sheriff.org/faqs/displayfaq.cfm?id=54934ef5-c69b-4771...
[2] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_ratio_for_slaves_to_s...
https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy
The issues list in the sidebar digs into each topic a little bit more deeply (cell tracking, biometrics, etc.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230477280457555...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline
http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/09/facebook-privacy/
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/14...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/canadian-gro...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/140182/facebooks_beacon_more_...
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa...
http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-f...
As I understand it, FB is currently only required to respond to appropriately specific subpoenas and warrants. If the cops want more, they should petition for laws to require that and we can all argue about it like responsible citizens. And we could equally demand more protection.
But this thing where sometimes FB voluntarily sends law enforcement bits of information and sometimes they don't based on poorly defined criteria is just creepy. And why does FB even want this responsibility? Isn't the simplest, most obvious model to say no by default?
Maybe Facebook wants to cultivate the appearance of being a "safe place", as a precursor to opening its services to younger users? That would certainly be a way of growing their user base.
I agree that whatever the reason they're doing this is, it's misguided and creepy.
I ask because I've never heard anything like that, despite working with the teams that build tools to fight spam, scams, fake accounts, and to assist the User Operations team to handle reports from people who encounter harassment, bullying, and other anti-social or criminal activity.
I'm not sure I can express my skepticism about this enough - our security, safety, and site integrity teams are some of the most privacy-conscious people I know, and even a hint of something like this happening here would lead to very pointed questions asked at the weekly Q&A every week until it was resolved.
Really, are you surprised that there are federal agents on the premises, or just upset at the thought that FB users' privacy could be compromised in such a situation? To the degree that FB forum and groups ToS conforms with federal law and moreover seeks to go above and beyond the letter of the law then FB in this regard could be thought of as an extension of the federal government in such matters with regards to its own users. In this light it is no more relevant whether federal agents look at private or group communications, as opposed to bona fide FB employees. It doesn't matter. This is a private company; the first amendment doesn't apply. In any case, FB as a company isn't exactly widely respected for its position on its users' data, nor is it known to play nice with its users' privacy.
Let's not forget that of the companies whom the federal government sought to extract users' accounts' data from with regards to the Wikileaks issue 18 months ago, only Twitter publicized the compelled exposure of its users' data. Facebook happily gave the feds all the users' info they sought without telling us about it.
Although IIRC you have said that you've worked with the FB spam and fake account / phishing detection team, FB is a large enough organization at this point that the team responsible for complying with federal mandates and managing FB's relation with federal law enforcement is separate. Tao Stein and team have no bearing on this particular matter, nor should they care that real users happen to talk about and discuss real issues that federal agents think should be taken down. This is a separate matter entirely from what you've worked on.
In a fair system, there's no one custodian. It's not perfect, but it's reasonably workable. There are some prerequisites, however.
Facebook is essentially using the same techniques to monitor private communications as the NSA supposedly does. This means Facebook has the power to report, for example, selected messages but not others. (I'm not saying they do, of course, just that they could be selective or discriminatory that way.)
The fact is that Facebook has taken upon itself a role similar to that of the police, but without any democratic oversight.
This is different from a bar owner overhearing a conversation about a crime and calling the police, because he wasn't specifically monitoring every single word said by every bar patron. But Facebook is casting a wide net by analyzing every conversation that happens.
Questions: should Facebook be permitted to do this? Should we ask for laws preventing companies from "eavesdropping" on their users' communications with the intent of detecting and reporting criminal behavior? Should this be the role of the democratically-elected government instead? Should sites be required to turn user communication over to the government for such analysis?
It's a fascinating area of law/politics with so much room for future development, and gets down to the heart of what values a society has.
Conversations of "what was that shit resturant you went to the other day" would probably get flagged as well once they replied with an address. Or indeed local phrased like "I'm hittting the bank first then we can meet up at the bar on 42nd street" were the term hitting is slang for nothing more than a harmless turn of phrase saying i'm going to the bank. Nothing sinister, though could easily be misinterpreted.
There are many others and also people have nicknames.
Still on the plus side, it will create alot of jobs were you get to read other people so called private conversations :|.
And while this has always been the case ever since letter writing, electronic communication is so much easier to parse and distribute and copy on bulk.
(well, I did because I participated in GSoC, and they needed my address to pay me, which I decided was worth it for me! Etc. etc.)
You know it would not supprise me one bit if FaceBook had staff monitoring this modding down every post that holds them in true^H^H^H^HBAD light.
Thank you I appreciete the feedback. +1 to you for that
This is not supprising in any way.
If you don't like this then don't do FaceBook - realy that easy I have found.
Apparently people have sent their friends money, rent, etc. and did that as a joke, boom, it's a nightmare.
Question is, do they warn you that your private conversation is not private and do they comply with the data protection acts the various countries have and more importantly who monitors FB? So many things can be taken out of context and acted upon in good faith at the detrement of innocent parties, this is concerning. But I don't do FB, nor do I have any immediate plans either. That has nothing to do with this, but more todo with concerns in general about there privacy and policeys they act out.
Now the fun part is another friend of ours (call him Jeb) was in the habit of making movie quotes when he started phone calls, so he calls up Mickey and leads in with a Lethal Weapon 2 line about "shipments", completely unknowning that the DEA was potentially tapping the call.
Because of the way the warrant was written, Mickey was able to wave off the tap on Jeb's call since it only covered calls from Ken. But it could just as easily led to all sorts of other problems since between friends, the level of discourse can go far afield of what a non-initiated 3rd party might consider normal.