New domestic surveillance details emerge, Daily Kos, August 2, 2010, by Deep Harm, used with permission, quoted verbatim:
In the past few days, details have emerged about two domestic surveillance programs tasked with creating dossiers on American internet users. Project Vigilant is an alliance of government, ISP providers and 600 volunteers. Recorded Future, a Google and CIA “investment” “scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents,” purportedly for predicting the “future.”
About Recorded Future, Wired Magazine’s Danger Room reports:
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.
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“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”
About Project Vigilant, Andy Greenberg at Forbes.com’s “The Firewall” reports:
According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can “develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.”
“Project Vigilant has been operating in near total secrecy for over a decade, monitoring potential domestic terrorist activity and tracking various criminal activities on the Web,” writes Mark Albertson, at the Baltimore Examiner.
SIDEBAR: In the comments, 8ackgr0und N015e responds:
They have been operating for over a decade, BUT
they missed 9/11.
they haven’t stemmed the tide of coke.
they haven’t prevented identity theft.
they missed the banking fraud.
remind me again… what are they doing?
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Reportedly, the information can be collected legally and, in the case of Recorded Future, the CIA expects to make a profit from it. And, these aren’t the only operations underway, either.
U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units. [Wired]
Many practices used to snare bad guys unfortunately could also be used by the government for nefarious purposes by the government; and without rigorous oversight, it’s practically guaranteed based on past secretive domestic surveillance programs.
Greenberg also describes how Uber and US intelligence agencies leaned on Adrian Lamo to target Bradley Manning and Wikileaks. He reveals that Lamo later regretted his decision to inform on Manning. Adrian Lamo, it turns out, was a Project Vigilant “volunteer.” Greenwald directs our attention to this videotaped interview of Adrian Lamo, whose speech is extremely slow and slurred as he provides a somewhat different story.
Implications
Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you.
- The Police
It is reasonable for government agencies to monitor the internet for “trends” that could improve their ability to interdict threats to the nation. It is also reasonable to monitor the internet to intercept hackers trying to disrupt critical systems. But, conducting these activities off-campus creates enormous potential for abuse, as this excerpt from an ACLU report (courtesy of Greewald) explains.
The use of private-sector data aggregators allows the government to insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny. That is sometimes an important motivation in outsourced surveillance. Private companies are free not only from complying with the Privacy Act, but from other checks and balances, such as the Freedom of Information Act. They are also insulated from oversight by Congress and are not subject to civil-service laws designed to ensure that government policymakers are not influenced by partisan politics. . . .
The government’s ability to add value to corporate information via other data collected by the NSA turns even benign information into a powerful weapon – for good or evil. ”While advertisers really only care about your online profile (IP address) in order to assess what you do and who you are, the Government wants your online activities linked to your actual name and other identifying information,” writes Greenwald. Where operations are kept secret, there is no oversight, there is no means to dispute the accuracy of records, no limitation on how long the records can be kept, no control over their use.
This powers accumulating in government/corporate hands could be used one day to disrupt the election process, conduct political witch hunts, coerce elected officials, and much more. Equally bad, in an world where retaliation is possible for even the smallest deviations from the mainstream, individuals will self-censor themselves, becoming “a class of meek citizens who know they are being constantly watched.” Then, who will be willing to speak up to prevent the next catastrophe?
Email Deep Harm: deep_harm AT yahoo.com
See Obama administration wants more warrantless surveillance of Americans, Daily Kos on Evans Liberal Politics, July 30, 2010, by Joan McCarter. News on privacy, the internet and warrentless surveilance.
See DOJ Pushing to Expand Warrantless Access to Internet Records, Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 29, 2010, by Tim Jones.
Read this collection of resources on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Read the Wikipedia article on the NSA electronic surveillance program.
Watch NSA spyroom at AT&T exposed, MSNBC video on YouTube — 5:11.
Read Ron Paul on “More Secrets, More Surveillance, Less Security”, Eurasia Review, July 30, 2010, by Ron Paul.
See also The Takeaway from 91,000 Leaked Secret Documents on Afghanistan: It’s Bad. Very Bad. Time to Go, AlterNet, August 3, 2010, by Will Durst.
"Every Breath You Take,": The Police give a slightly different sound to their awesome hit, live from Rio in December, 2007. — 5:59.
"Zoo Staion:" U2 perfoms ‘Zoo Station,’ a song not so well known but sounding great, performed live on 08/16/1992 at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium – Washington, D.C. — 4:31
"Love And Peace Or Else," U2 performs this wonderful song, full of portent and warning, on their Vertigo Tour in 2005, from Brazil. — 4:36. Dedicated to my friends, Shannon and Wes.
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