Comment by spikels | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spikels | Hacker News Reader

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This is even worse than it seems. A "hop" can go both ways. So if a terror suspect calls Comcast's main 800 number (or any other high volume number) they can track everyone who ever called that number. And obviously they have to deal with the fact that many people have multiple numbers and treat them as a single node. Three hops from a few thousand suspected terrorists each with multiple phone numbers might include a large fraction of the US population.

Not sure how this could possibly be helpful in an investigation if everyone is a suspect. At some point you have to narrow it down.

Edit: Apparently there are 875,000 names in the "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" (TIDE) [1]

So if each of those suspects can be connected to 20 people (hop 1 - 20 people) and each those people can be connected to an additional 20 people (hop 2 - 400 people) and connected again to 21 more (hop 3 - 8,000 people) you could reach the entire world's population.

875,000 x 8,000 = 7 billion

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/03/us-usa-security-da...

I wonder how many "hops" the average American is away from Kevin Bacon. My guess is that 3 is on the low end of it.

Just a guess: Me<->Senator<->Movie Exec<->Kevin Bacon

With 4 or more hops it surely becomes pretty trivial. "Phonecall hops" are a much lower bar than "worked with" hops.

The article noted people everyone on the internet is on average 4.74 hops from someone else. [1]

If they say "Two or three", that makes me believe that they have no constraints on it, and merely query as many hops' worth of data as is enough to give what they feel to be Enough. "Two or three" implies, IMO, "... to five".

1: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and...

The article specifically addresses this question:

> For a sense of scale, researchers at the University of Milan found in 2011 that everyone on the Internet was, on average, 4.74 steps away from anyone else.

If you have a nearly universal database, you can probably get pretty close to covering the entire population of the country with 3 hops.

marshray downthread brings up a great point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059864)

Even if you assume a low chance of everyone getting hit in 3 hops from one Kevin Bacon, there of course isn't just one Kevin Bacon. That "terrorist watch list" is pretty damn long.

I'd think you have a good shot at two, almost guaranteed no more than 3.

I'm from Norway, and yet can easily make that kind of connection in 4 hops: I've spoken to a few Norwegian MP's, who obviously have spoken to quite a few Norwegian prime ministers.

There's probably a number of other connections from her as she would have met any number of internationally renowned people both in capacity as prime minister and as WHO director - including US politicians - that might have met Kevin Bacon, but courtesy of the Oracle of Bacon she also has a Bacon number of 2 based on appearing in a talkshow as a guest alongside Michael Bolton documentary with Michael Bolton, who has appeared in some awards show with Kevin Bacon.

Chances are good there's some less obvious route that'd get me there in 3 hops. Once you "allow" off screen meetings, it gets really easy.

It would surprise me, for example, if Kevin Bacon hasn't met some relatively prominent US politicians and/or celebrities that has met one of the Norwegian MP's I've spoken to (for two hops), or if he hasn't met one of the US politicians or artists that have been at the Nobel peace price concerts, where they'd have met either aforementioned Gro Harlem Brundtland or any number of other Norwegian politicians that would either include someone I've met or definitively have met someone I've met (for 3 hops).

I think people tend to overestimate how many steps it'll take, because they see these celebrities and politicians they can't relate to that they think are so far apart from "their" world, but of course that is silly because these people tend to meet a lot of people, and so are natural "shortcuts" to get low number of hops to anyone. For example:

I'm two hops from Mao and Castro (via a trade-union rep I met that was introduced to Mao on a group trip to China in the 60's, and a former left wing politician I've met that met Castro on a visit to Cuba), and as a result at most 3 hops from Stalin and Nixon and most other major leaders contemporaneous with either of them, ranging from "ordinary politicians" to a fascinating laundry list of horrible dictators.

It really is a small world.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a parlor game based on the "six degrees of separation" concept, which posits that any two people on Earth are six or less acquaintance links apart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon

I don't see why they would limit it to phone calls. It would make more sense to use ANY connection: coworkers, phone call, text, email, Facebook friend, relatives, members of organization/school/church, physical location, etc. Any of these could be a "hop".

>> With 4 or more hops it surely becomes pretty trivial.

Just a heads up, your example only had 3 hops.

You (Hop 1) Senator (Hop 2) Movie Exec (Hop 3) Kevin Bacon

So if a terror suspect calls Comcast's main 800 number (or any other high volume number) they can track everyone who ever called that number

Note Comcast and other commodity services and their tendency for geographical monopolies, and that this is wholeheartedly supported by the governments by which they operate.

>"Comcast harbors and supports terrorism."

Got it.

>"The government is an accomplice to companies that harbors and supports terrorism."

Got it.

"inafield and samstave both authored posts which were found to contain positive sentiment towards the topic 'support terrorism'"

Got it. Forever. --NSA

You posted a comment in reply to one of them. You're just one hop away from a potential terrorist. Now they've got you too, forever.

(And me as well, but seeing as I'm a dirty foreigner I'm sure they've got me already)

It's not so much "everyone is a suspect". It's "everyone is recorded"; investigating any suspect becomes not a matter of data collection, but of data collation. A hadoop job.

You're correct - if it's not useful to the investigation of the person who called Comcast, why would they look at everyone who has called Comcast?

Common sense says that they would not look at that data. If the response is "well they're power hungry, they'll look at whatever they want" then the discussion about the number of hops used is irrelevant since a power-hungry and abusive organization would find no value in limits on this sort of thing in the first place.

On the contrary, common sense--as most of us understand it--has nothing to do with this. The rationale is to gather all data that's potentially useful at some unknown point in the future, and hang on to it for that unknown eventuality.

Case in point: all the license plate surveillance stories that came out today. (Not sure why today, this has been well understood for a couple years now.)

Every single government official and LEO talked to about this data say that gathering and keeping the data indefinitely on 260 million plates, in order to apprehend just 136 individuals, is good practice.

If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.

And the point of this "hops" story isn't whether they're looking at everyone now, it's whether your data is being automatically gathered and stored today to construct who knows what perspectives about you in the future. And at 3 hops of potentially useful data, odds are yes.

>Every single government official and LEO talked to about this data say that gathering and keeping the data indefinitely on 260 million plates, in order to apprehend just 136 individuals, is good practice.

>If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.

I would think this is a perfectly acceptable reason from the point of the NSA, or as someone who would like as much data available as possible to debug a problem. If I could log every event on every cloud instance I've ever launched negligibly this would be something I obviously would want to do as it would help tracking down issues immensely (assuming that I'm not drowning from data overload).

Debugging of your source code is not equal to a pervasive surveillance state intruding on individual privacy, unless you are to assume (incorrectly) that we are all owned by the state and have no independent rights apart from the state.

In the eyes of the law, debugging my source code and tracking every place your car drives on public roads (non intrusively without attaching a GPS device) are exactly the same: legal.

But previous articles posted to HN have had arguments by law professors that at least some of what the NSA is doing is actually illegal, even aside from questions of constitutionality.

The power hungry and abusive still like to give their actions a veil of legitimacy. Abusive behavior might be impossible to stop entirely, but that is absolutely not a justification for making it legal.

But if the discussion of hops is just a veil then that means it has no bearing to what they are actually doing behind the veil.

I don't understand this argument. The discussion of hops is a veil in the sense that it allows them to feign compliance to oversight and limitations.

But, in reality, they are doing exactly what they represent, except without limitations. So, there is direct bearing.

And, the concern is that by fudging the limits, it's gone from a limited program that gives at least a nod to 4tb Amendment protections to one that is virtually unlimited.

You're 100% right and don't deserve the downvotes. If the rebuttal is that they're power-hungry and abusive, the discussion about the number of hops is utterly pointless.

Actually, it's the opposite.

The discussion about the number of hops is the result of their attempts to thwart oversight. They are misrepresenting what they are doing, so as to avoid constraints.

In other words, they are power-hungry and abusive.

"Not sure how this could possibly be helpful in an investigation if everyone is a suspect."

b/c it has nothing to do with an investigation...now blackmail and extortion??? That's another story.

[citation needed] for the blackmail and extortion. It's inane to be so quick to jump from mere ability to do something bad to intent to do something bad.

The FBI letter blackmailing MLK to kill himself:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo...

Summed up by a history prof:

When you teach American history as I do, you get asked about conspiracies a lot. As it happens, I’m skeptical about some of the biggest conspiracy theories out there — unlike nearly all of my students, for instance, I think it’s highly likely that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

But I’m not one to ridicule such theories either, and I find the smug dismissal with which they’re so often greeted deeply obnoxious. Because forty-seven years ago one of America’s highest ranking law enforcement agents launched a secret campaign intended to blackmail the country’s most prominent civil rights activist into committing suicide.

That’s not a theory, it’s a fact. And once you know that, it gets a lot harder to dismiss other people’s stories of shadowy government goings-on.

-- http://studentactivism.net/2012/01/15/the-fbis-attempt-to-bl...

Comparing the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover to the DoJ's FBI of 2013 is like comparing the Long Island State Park Commission of Robert Moses to the New York State Office of Parks & Recreation of 2013. Hoover's FBI was a personal fiefdom accountable to nobody, not even the President.

Also, odious as the letter is, it's not exactly forceful. If MLK's civil rights struggle had been shifted forward in time today and he had posted the "I Have A Dream" speech directly to Youtube, he'd have found far worse.

Agreed that Hoover was a bad actor. Thankfully he had fewer tools at his disposal than today's bad actor would. Even those who feel they've learned nothing else new recently (feeling they'd seen evidence of these programs previously), have now learned there are apparently insufficient controls over individual access to "collecting" (taking off the shelf and looking at) NSA files.

Every few months another cop or DMV employee is busted for looking at records they shouldn't. In my book, this problem of collecting the data but not partitioning it from bad actors is one that should be getting more airtime at all levels of government and all levels of security.

I, simultaneously,

(1) Agree that the powers technology has implicitly granted the DoJ are a cause for concern; and

(2) am comforted, not alarmed, by a drumbeat of stories about government employees getting busted for looking at records they shouldn't be looking at.

"That example of obscene overreach and abuse of a government agency does not count because it is nothing more than an example of obscene overreach and abuse of a government agency."

I think the argument is that you need more justification to claim that a government agency is engaging in blackmail and extortion than "a once in a century character in a different government agency 50 years ago at the height of a national paranoia not seen since that time sent someone a nasty letter."

The fear is that they are creating tools that would give Hoover an orgasm on the spot, and we don't know that there isn't another Hoover.

We don't need concrete proof of current wrong-doing in order to take lessons from history. That is the value of history.

I agree with you, but I was responding to the claim:

"b/c it has nothing to do with an investigation...now blackmail and extortion???"

I read that as something stronger than "we need to take lessons from history." I think the statement goes further than that to claim that the NSA's purported justifications are entirely pretense and the real motivation is blackmail and extortion. That I think requires stronger proof than "someone sometime did something."

Are you afraid of the New York State Parks & Rec department? Your logic suggests you should be.

Have you read Caro's _Power Broker_? If not, you should!

Fears and cautions should not be tied to organizations themselves, but rather to actions. The NSA is not the FBI, yet memories of Hoover should give pause to anyone considering the NSA.

Tying fear and caution to organizations prevents you from learning much of anything from history as the offending organizations are almost all abolished, abandoned, or reorganized. Should experimentalists working in medicine and the humanities not learn from the Tuskegee Experiment because Public Health Service is a different organization today and the Tuskegee Institute no longer exists in a meaningful way?

I don't think anybody disagrees with the broad point you're making; this subthread is talking about how likely it is that the FBI is blackmailing people and trying (clumsily) to convince people to kill themselves based on the actions of Hoover's FBI.

No. It's inane to create conditions under which "mere ability" is so powerful and accessible, then rely on hope and faith that there are no bad actors with "intent" to "do something [evil]". It's not as if we haven't been there before.

OTOH, it's perfectly reasonable to be concerned about the capabilities that we give our government. That is exactly what distinguishes various forms of government and exactly why we have a Constitution that defines ours as it does.

This is a good summation of NSA discussion on HN lately: someone asking for a citation gets downvoted. Good job guys!

I don't know why you would assume a hop goes both ways.

First because it could be potentially useful if you want to catch terrorists. For example if a suspected terrorist calls person X and person Y also calls X, X may be the terrorist leader and Y may be another terrorist.

Second why would they limit it to one direction? There seems to be little if any legal or practical downside to simply collecting more data.

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