Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

Third parties have little to risk by targeting this kind of market because private companies are just as interested in exploiting customer data.

That's not really the point. Even 1/10 as sophisticated technology can be equally potent, especially if they are concentrating on a person (if the data is there, they can even do the correlations manually, say in Excel. It will just take more time).

Furthermore, the creation of the technology (and even the operation) can be outsourced to private entities. Or just bought wholesale.

Imagine if a Russian cybercrime gang gained access to NSA's Quantum Insert method, for example.

It's not so simple to change the government that you're under.

Let's say you bring corruption charges to light, or advocate for something people in power don't like, or even just cut off someone's angry nephew in traffic.

In a country with a rule of law, that's okay --- you're safe. You can't just be arbitrarily punished.

But with this? No problem. They just tell the NSA to flag you, and as soon as you do _anything_, they'll get you. Better still if the data's retroactive --- if they can track everyone, and figure out that three years ago you caught a fish and transported it across state lines or whatever.

If you have a legal system that classes a majority of people as technically a criminal, and the capacity to selectively enforce that, then congratulations, you've got despotism.

This means you've got a practical means of confidently predicting potential crime. Even better, the same mechanisms that help you predict potential criminal acts also help you close active cases more efficiently. That inevitably results in significant boosts to police productivity.

So armed, you now get to deploy your existing resources more effectively. Instead of parking a patrol car at a "pretty good spot" to nail violators for a few hours, you'll reposition yourself continuously to the location offering the greatest probability of an arrest/citation at that specific moment in time. Instead of passively waiting for violators to happen across your location, you're actively positioning yourself to nail them directly. The specific individual doesn't matter.

But you won't be dispatching patrollers in the current manner. Since you'll also be tracking your own patrol cars, you can correlate the two and dispatch each car to the highest probability incident nearest to them where they're likely to catch a potential perpetrator. By having everyone under effective surveillance, for every minute of every day, each of your resources will always be deployed in the most efficient manner possible.

Where it really gets wild is when you start to consider traffic enforcement automation along with the push for local government drone coverage. Along with the existing red light and speed cameras, you'll have mobile platforms capable of filling in for any holes in your patrol car coverage while also benefitting from the same efficiency gains described earlier. And they'll be gathering additional data (movements, facial recognition, automatic number plate recognition, etc.) to send back to base while they're doing it.

It won't be like The Machine from Person of Interest, but all things considered, it'll be closer to it than anything else to date.

We aren't talking about 'law' here, we're talking about 'people.' That gets lost some times.

Someone with access to these tools might decide the shake down Jack with a bit of blackmail. They might decide to sell union organizing 'alerts' to business. These are not legal but there are many people who work in an organization with these tools available who could justify abusing them.

Consider another hotbed subject which gets argued the other way all the time, gun ownership.

Now we can all agree that someone owning a gun who follows all of the safety precautions, and doesn't wave it about irresponsibly Etc is no threat to society. And yet the argument is put forward that the capability is the threat and people other than the owner may exploit that capability (a thief steals the gun, a spouse grabs it in a fit of rage, Etc.) and that it is "better" to not allow the person to own a gun because the risk of that gun falling into the wrong hands and doing something bad are non-zero enough.

This is the same argument we should make on surveillance technology, which is that the potential for its abuse and damaging the lives of innocent civilians, out weighs the 'benefit' the law enforcement agency gets from having it. There are other ways for the agency to do its job, just as there are other ways for our homeowner to protect their property, that don't require this capability.

A lack of faith pretty well justified at this point.

I appreciate the annoyance at "oh noes teh NSA!", but this article exactly points out the problem: local, not state or federal, authorities are where this will be an issue.

Everyone is busy hopping on the "fuck the NSA" bus, and that conveniently draws fire from the numerous local police departments that are expanding their own reach.

Don't get distracted--the same data is just as dangerous (if not more dangerous) in the hands of local officials than some folks at an alphabet-soup agency.

The article title includes "What the Government Could Do With All That Location Data". The emphasis is on what is technically possible, not on what is legal. Given the vast expansion of legal authority to collect and use data on American citizens over the past decade, the article rightly looks at what is possible tomorrow based on the data of today, because what is legal tomorrow cannot be predicted accurately.

I entirely agree that the anger over the Snowden revelations should be first directed at the US congressmen responsible for authorizing these programs in the first place. However, much of what they authorized wasn't even public information until Snowden came along, so your argument that we should not worry much about the infrastructure of the surveillance state because the laws of that state prohibit such surveillance is undermined by the enormous secrecy with which it operates. We don't even know how some intelligence agencies interpret the laws that have been written. In an environment filled with so much legal uncertainty, knowing what is technologically possible, and knowing what the incentives surrounding that technology are, is extremely valuable.

I am not sure you are listening, what is happening around you.

> This anger at the NSA should also be directed at the congressmen voting for these laws of large scope in the first place. Hopefully we can get rid of NSLs too. But the NSA is just doing the most it can with the tools we give it (which is what we expect). And rule of law is actually working, we just have some shitty laws.

It's working for whom? Presumably these laws require a little bit less privacy for a more secure country. I didn't see Boston bombings avoided. If the answer to this is please give us more privacy, to avoid this in the future, I'd say no.

What "rule of law"?

The one who predominantly targets blacks and latinos?

The one that sends people to life terms in prison for non violenet BS crimes, if they do three of them?

The one who, in 2014, jails people for smoking a joint?

The one who, in 2014, in a western democracy nonetheless, still uses capital punishment?

The one who big corporations make a laughing stock of?

The one who has the highest incarceration rate in the world, by a large margin?

I'd like to beg your pardon, because I'm not from the US. I'm British, so I'm sure there are large contextual elements of this situation I'm not understanding. But can anyone explain to me how this can happen?

I mean, I've grown up being told that there are two types of legal framework for a country: ones with a constitution and ones without. In countries without a constitution, like Britain, the politicians can do whatever they like. In fact, it's always a big principle in the UK that parliament cannot bind its successors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty

But in a country with a constitution, I always thought that wasn't correct. If a politician wants to change the law they can, except where that conflicts with the constitution.

Now, my understanding of America is that it has strong constitutional safeguards in place for such things as free speech and unreasonable searches.

Isn't there some constitutional court that people can take this kind of thing, to find out if it all really is legal? Because if politicians really can make any law they want, surely you don't actually have a constitution in the US at all?

Such as?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_...

THEY CAN APPLY THESE TECHNOLOGIES TO THE ENTIRE POPULATION AT ONCE AS THEY ARE NO LONGER LIMITED BY NUMBER OF OFFICERS AVAILABLE.

This carries new, complex risks for society at large. How hard is that to understand? Relying solely on unclear "policy" and "access controls" to protect us from these risks is extremely foolish. Now, I'm not saying this is happening now, or will happen tomorrow. But these thought exercises are very useful and informative.

Digging through this site's javascript I found this comment: "Für diesen Quellcode komme ich nicht in den Himmel."

It is evident: https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/

Besides, the issue is also location data from cell tower triangulation. That data is available to your cell carrier whenever you connect to their network.

I remember reading a meta-analysis of lie detection and deception studies in humans, and there was one social psychology experiment where the participants were asked not to lie for the duration of the experiment. They couldn't even use the tactic of "white lying."

Overwhelmingly the participants said it was extremely difficult not to lie and when they couldn't lie, it ended up causing their stress levels to rise and their relationships suffered. Lying, or much more fundamentally - concealing, is a necessary process for maintaining social relationships. [You don't want to tell Mary what you really think about her new dress, and in the same way, you don't want to tell your boyfriend that you're throwing him a surprise party, even if he asks you directly.] As technology becomes increasingly woven into our social fabric, it's going to have to conform with our pre-established patterns.

Now just do that with everyone with every data's ounce you can get your hands on, and you've got yourself The Machine from Person of Interest, without the silly "identify crime before it happens" angle, but with enough information to also flesh out everybody's social graph independently of the attack surface you might have online. This is how A Scanner Darkly becomes true.

I remember watching PoI to you and thinking, "this is silly, it's impossible to do this, without human operators and secret access to private feeds". Now, it feels like the screen writers I was underestimating after years of silly "electrical outlet viruses" and the like in movies were much more forward thinking and acurate than I was.

Also, you seem to suggest the government tracking is vehicle related. A mobile phone would be a much easier method of determining whether you're in a vehicle or not.

When one of the authors, Ryan Grim, called me for comment, he said that while Glenn Greenwald was transitioning to his new Omidyar-funded venture he was temporarily publishing his Snowden leaks with HuffPo. So when he asked for my take on the NSA story, pretty much the first words out of my mouth were, “Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans?” The story quotes practically everything I said to Grim except that remark, even though I returned to the point a couple of times and emphasized that it summed up my view.

I don’t think HuffPo cut the quote because they ran out of electrons. The article itself is so tediously long that I defy anyone to read every word in a single go.

Nor because my remark was inaccurate. It turns out that Glenn Greenwald has written an entire book devoted to exposing the contradiction between Republicans’ ideology and their private lives. In Greenwald’s words, “While the right wing endlessly exploits claims of moral superiority … virtually its entire top leadership have lives characterized by the most decadent, hedonistic, and morally unrestrained behavior imaginable …[including] a string of shattered marriages, active out-of-wedlock sex lives, and highly ‘untraditional’ and ‘un-Christian’ personal lives [endless detail omitted].” His book certainly makes the NSA memo sound restrained and cautious, but both are motivated by the same idea.

Grim and Greenwald very likely cut the quote because it would have undermined the narrative of the piece, which combines solicitude for the poor Islamists whose sexual and financial hypocrisy might be exposed with outrage at the NSA for even considering such a tactic. The quote would have made them look like, well, hypocrites.

The incident makes me wonder what else Greenwald leaves out of his stories. And why we should continue to trust snippets of documents selected by someone who thinks that the difference between Islamist extremists and Republicans is that one is an enemy that deserves no quarter and the other is sort of like Martin Luther King, except for the part about wanting to kill us.

[1] http://www.volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-enemy/