-Google Wants You to Profile Yourself.
Google’s information appetite is never-ending , and now the search-and-advertising giant wants your help in building a profile page that will show up anytime anyone searches on your name.
Be afraid.
The Google Profile service is intended to let you tell Google how to index you. You tell it (or hide from it) your picture, your bio, and links to your pages around the web — such as your Facebook account, Wikipedia page or your Twitter feed. It also includes a handy feature to let people email you, without actually giving out your email address.
Right now, those profiles show up low in regular search results, but as people begin to fill them out, Google will likely make them the top result for your name.
That puts Google even more firmly in control of the index of your online life. In fact, Google’s power will make it imperative for you to fill out your profile, lest you give Google all of the control over what people find about you on the net (see Google’s profile search, for instance)
-Pentagon Targeting Online Social Networks, v2.0.
SEE ALSO:
Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites [LINK]
US Intelligence Agencies Targeting Online Gaming Networks [LINK]
Social Media In The Military: Insight Into The Future of Social Networks [LINK]
A new startup is helping reshape the social networking landscape by using artificial intelligence to automate the process of identifying, finding and retrieving specific types of information locked within online communities.
Over the past decade, social networks have become a powerful new force for attracting internet traffic. In the UK, Facebook is currently the second most popular website followed by Google, according to Hitwise, an internet research firm.
It’s not surprising that the names of the various social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn have become common destinations for younger people as well as businesses.
But finding information and expert sources of knowledge quickly within social networks is neither easy nor efficient and valuable information is left buried within online communities.
To date, much of the technology focus has been on building document-based information retrieval techniques, leaving the process of identifying human sources of information, also known as “expertise identification,” with much less attention.
Enter a group of scientists and military officers who have helped build a new social analytics tool that identifies and automatically uncovers intelligence to help military personnel perform better in the field.
SRI International based in Menlo Park, California, teamed up with military officers to build a new social analytics tool called iLink that generates models and helps streamline the process by which a specific expert in an online community can be found.
In simple terms, iLink is a machine learning-based system that models users and content in a social network and then points the user to relevant content.
The team developed the basic social networking technology, which combines workflow and analytics. The research and development effort was part of a five-year project called CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes), and funded by the US Department of Defense.
“They wanted a real system to be built and deployed into military settings,” said Jeffrey Davitz, an SRI scientist and co-developer of the iLink technology. “What we did was connect the text mining technology that had been done in social media and connected it to the Web 2.0 applications,” he added.
The iLink system had several goals, including real-time learning by matching queries and communities users; adapting to user demands and directions, providing accuracy in message targeting and routing and, finally, dynamic user profile correction based on community behaviours and identification of community experts.
The learning in iLink occurs by watching a natural social network, and selecting effective strategies that emerge from the system as the members try to solve problems. The system continuously monitors the real social network and it is capable of drafting from the social network’s learning.
“We started with a lot of analytics stuff, text flow and workflow,” Davitz said.
The iLink software uses artificial intelligence software and message routing technology to help the system learn about the online participants and move specific questions to those who are best equipped to answer them. The SRI scientists basically build a profile of each person in the community and the iLink system starts to learn about the movement of information around the community.
The US military is currently evaluating the iLink technology and how it can be applied to solve battlefield problems as well as help promote professional development, and support military families.
The researchers said the military uses a Facebook-like social community to help soldiers learn from others who had been in Iraq. The SRI scientists met with cadets at West Point in early 2007 to help refine and further develop the system.
Prior to the development of the iLink system, the cadets had written and developed their own software to help connect communities so various types of questions arising from counter-insurgency and battlefield situations in Iraq could be asked. Basically, the iLink system cuts across three online military communities with the expressed purpose of improving the way army platoon leaders and even wives, share critical information.
Looking beyond the military, the applications for this kind of smart social networking technology are broad and diverse. The two SRI scientists are planning to spin off the technology into a startup to be called Social Kinetics. The team is currently working on a healthcare application.
And with the demand for social networking growing – estimates for social networking users in the US alone by 2012 is expected to hit 92.2 million, according to In-Stat’s Hitwise research service – the commercial benefits to businesses and individuals could be immense.
The biggest demographic adopting and using social networking technologies are college students. In 2008, 95.7% of college students and 17.4 million people will go online at least once a month, according to a new report from eMarketer.
Much of the push for social networking technologies is because students demand access to friends and information whenever they want and wherever they are.
-Report: Data Mining For Terrorists Doesn’t Work.
c|net:
The most extensive government report to date on whether terrorists can be identified through data mining has yielded an important conclusion: It doesn’t really work.
A National Research Council report, years in the making and scheduled to be released Tuesday, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism “is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.” Inevitable false positives will result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being incorrectly flagged as suspects.
The whopping 352-page report, called “Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,” amounts to at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department’s controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003.
-Surveillance software revenue to quadruple by 2013.
In a new study that has potentially Orwellian implications, ABI Research projects that revenue for video surveillance software will quadruple over the next five years.
According to ABI Vice President and Research Director Stan Schatt, revenue generated from surveillance software will increase to more than US$900 million in 2013, up from current revenues of US$245 million. Schatt says there are several big drivers for this increase, including increased spending on security systems by the government, on theft prevention systems by retail outlets and on surveillance by market researchers. Additionally, he says that the advent of Wi-Fi has made it possible to place wireless cameras just about anywhere while still sending footage back to a central location.
Looking at the broader picture, Schatt says that technological advances are also increasing the scope and the potential uses of video surveillance. He says that one of the more disturbing uses is the ability of store marketing departments to actually monitor the eyeball movements of customers to figure out what products or displays draw their attention.
“When stores have the ability to observe you as you walk through a store, what I can imagine is that more and more stores will try to basically have a pretty in-depth knowledge of their customers,” he says. “So let’s say for instance the store issues you a discount card that also has a radio frequency ID that identifies who you are. And then let’s say they observe you looking at, but not actually purchasing, movies in the adult video section. Well, the next thing you know you’re getting all these promotional materials for racy movies you’re not even interested in.”
Schatt also notes that more and more banks are looking into installing cameras with face recognition ability to help prevent robberies before they even occur. Thus, when a known bank robber enters a bank, the camera can recognize his face and send out an alert. Casinos are already deploying this sort of face recognition software to monitor their employees, Schatt says, and using it to detect when certain employees enter into unauthorized areas and alerting the security team.
Schatt believes that as more surveillance equipment becomes increasingly digitized and software-reliant, it will increasingly move into the purview of IT departments. And because the surveillance software vastly broadens the extent to which companies and governments can watch people, it will inevitably create privacy concerns that will have to be addressed.
“Down the road our behavior is going to be observed much more frequently, and that has all kind of implications,” he says. “I mean, the fact that they’re actually looking at your eyeball movements shows we’ve reached a whole new realm of surveillance capabilities.”
-”Einstein” replaces ‘Big Brother’ in Internet surveillance
Wayne Madsen
Online Journal
Friday, Sept 19, 2008
WMR has learned from government sources that the Bush administration has authorized massive surveillance of the Internet using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the “Einstein” program.
Billed as a cyber-security intrusion detection system for federal computer systems and networks, WMR has been told that the actual intent of Einstein is to initially monitor the email and web surfing activities of federal employees and contractors and not in protecting government computer systems from intrusion by outsiders.
In February 2008, President Bush signed a directive that designated the National Security Agency (NSA) as the central administrator for the federal government’s computer and network security.
Although Einstein is primarily a program under the aegis of the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) of the National Cyber Security Division of the Homeland Security Department, WMR has learned that it has the personal support of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell, a former NSA director. Einstein is advertised as merely conducting traffic analysis within the dot (.) gov and dot (.) mil domains, including data packet lengths, protocols, source and destination IP addresses, source and destination ports, time stamp information, and autonomous system numbers. However, WMR has learned that Einstein will also bore down into the text of email and analyze message content. In fact, most of the classified budget allotted to Einstein is being used for collecting information from the text of messages and not the header data.
In fact, WMR has learned that most of the classified technology being used for Einstein was developed for the NSA in conducting signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations on email networks in Russia. Code-named PINWHEEL, the NSA email surveillance system targets Russian government, military, diplomatic, and commercial email traffic and burrows into the text portions of the email to search for particular words and phrases of interest to NSA eavesdroppers. According to NSA documents obtained by WMR, there is an NSA system code-named ”PINWALE.”
The DNI and NSA also plan to move Einstein into the private sector by claiming the nation’s critical infrastructure, by nature, overlaps into the commercial sector. There are classified plans, already budgeted in so-called “black” projects, to extend Einstein surveillance into the dot (.) com, dot (.) edu, dot (.) int, and dot (.) org, as well as other Internet domains. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has budgeted $5.4 billion for Einstein in his department’s FY2009 information technology budget. However, this amount does not take into account the “black” budgets for Einstein proliferation throughout the U.S. telecommunications network contained in the budgets for NSA and DNI.
In anticipation of the regulatory problems inherent in domestic email surveillance by the NSA, the Bush administration has ensured that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and industry associations have been stacked with pro-surveillance loyalists to ensure that Einstein is widely accepted and implemented.
The Cutting Edge of Defense IT
Technology has always been essential to military strength, but breakthroughs developed within the military often are not limited to weapons. This special report introduces some of the Pentagon’s most advanced information technology projects, in the context of their relation to commercial products and battlefield necessities.
[IMGCAP(1)]The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has fostered technologies ranging from the Internet to artificial intelligence research. Nowadays, the scientists it supports are pushing IT ever closer to achieving the processing power and cognitive awareness of living beings. At the same time DARPA is applying technology to the pressing threats imposed by current conflicts, the agency is sponsoring more than a dozen innovative projects, including a bid to perfect cheap, extremely accurate and nonradioactive atomic clocks for use in battlefield systems.
Advances in the mathematical algorithms for cryptography and the processing muscle behind them soon will transform the platforms that handle cascades of classified data, for example. National Security Agency officials characterize their work as a process of continuous ploy and counterploy in the rarefied realms of logic and computing.
The Grand Challenge of bringing practical, remotely piloted or autonomous land vehicles into use also is advancing via the competitive work of several teams. And in its approach to supercomputing, the Defense Department could be changing the way high-performance systems are measured, developed and purchased.
Mutating threats shape DARPA’s research in a wide range of new technologies
In a conflict where the biggest threats to soldiers often are low-tech, homemade explosives, it might not be obvious why troops need a more precise atomic clock to support their efforts. But the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency is working to deliver such precision, along with 13 other future icons that span a range of science and technology, from networking to air vehicles, biology and lasers, DARPA Director Tony Tether said.
The Chip Scale Atomic Clocks (CSACs), for instance, would perform key control functions throughout Pentagon networks and also could help warfighters detect an enemy’s presence.
All the Future Icon projects involve the application of computing resources to solve present and future defense missions, and some directly attack the problems of improving information technology performance for existing systems and futuristic computer architectures.
And they are the types of projects whose impact often extends beyond their original scope, affecting the development of technologies used elsewhere in government and commercially.
“They are tremendously difficult technical challenges that will be hard to solve without fundamentally new approaches — ones which may require bringing multiple disciplines to bear and perhaps even result in entirely new disciplines,” Tether said in testimony submitted recently to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities.
One of the most ambitious of the futuristic computer design projects is a five-year project to build a system modeled on the human brain, which would reflect and incorporate human assessments of the roles and intentions of people (see sidebar).
Shape shifters
The research agency is also probing highly advanced IT challenges such as the Programmable Matter project, which aims to develop software that would allow physical objects to change their size, shape, color and other attributes to fulfill changing functions within, say, a military communications system.
CSACs would tackle more immediate concerns in defense networks and in helping soldiers detect enemy vehicles and facilities, according to a leading scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who is researching the technology with DARPA support.
DARPA’s research is honing computer-based methods of detecting purposely hidden or naturally elusive enemy targets underground or on the high seas.
The CSAC project has been driven by the increasing need to reliably assure continual synchronization of systems linked via the Global Information Grid, said Thomas O’Brian, chief of the Time and Frequency Division at NIST’s laboratory in Boulder, Colo. The lab receives DARPA funding to support the development of chip-scale atomic clocks.
The tiny clocks could be deployed in hundreds of systems that military organizations at all levels rely on, including not only radios but also radars, sensors and location units that use the Global Positioning System, O’Brian said in an interview. The atomic clocks promise to make GPS systems more reliable while using little power, along with providing other helpful features, such as low weight and small size, he continued.
The CSACs “are significantly more accurate than the quartz crystal units ,which have been the standard” for such timekeeping, O’Brian said. The new generation of small clocks relies on the vibration frequency of elements such as cesium and rubidium to maintain their steady timekeeping and does not involve radioactive materials.
The tiny clocks can operate for as long as two days or more using the power available in a AA battery, O’Brian said.
“Another aspect of these devices is that they can serve as magnetometers,” he added. As such, the CSACs could sense the presence of metallic objects, such as mines or tanks. “You could scatter them across a wide area so when a Jeep or tank drives over, they might detect it,” O’Brian said. “Or they could detect the presence of ventilating fans in [al Qaeda caves] in Tora Bora [Afghanistan].”
CSACs already have proved themselves in demonstrations using GPS devices, and the technology showed that it could help navigation units function when satellite signals aren’t available, O’Brian said.
Some of the main tasks remaining before the CSACs reach routine use include:
- Developing efficient, low-cost mass-production methods.
- Improving the small clocks’ resistance to field conditions such as vibration, temperature and pressure variations and shock.
- Reducing power consumption.
O’Brian expressed confidence that researchers could soon achieve those improvements.
The research agency’s push in the fields of “detection, precision identification, tracking and destruction of elusive targets” has spawned several research projects. One group of them aims to improve methods for finding and investigating caves, and another centers on tracking seaborne vessels.
The cave research has gained momentum partly from the response of adversary countries’ forces to the success of the Pentagon’s spy satellite technology. Countries such as Iran and North Korea reportedly have built extensive underground facilities to conceal some of their nuclear-weapon production facilities from orbiting sensors.
The underground research spurred by such strategic threats also has led DARPA to study how better cave technology can aid tactical operations, such as by helping soldiers discover enemy troops and weapons lurking in small caves and by helping detect cross-border smuggling tunnels.
The Counter-Underground Facilities program aims at developing sensors, software and related technology to:
- Pinpoint the power, water airflow and exhaust vents from cave installations.
- Evaluate the condition of underground facilities before and after attacks.
- Monitor activities within cave structures during attacks.
According to DARPA procurement documents, the Pentagon’s cave program began by developing methods to learn about those conditions and other features of caves via Measurement and Signature Intelligence (Masint) technology.
Masint methods involve the use of extremely sophisticated and highly classified technology that can integrate information gathered by various types of sensors, including acoustic, seismic, electromagnetic, chemical, multispectral and gravity-sensing devices.
DARPA’s underground facility research project also involves investigation of the effluents coming from vents connected to cave complexes. Effluents for Vent Hunting research can involve the computerized evaluation of smoke to distinguish, for example, between decoy cooking fires and real cooking fires in an area where hostile forces may be roaming.
On the high seas, the Predictive Analysis for Naval Deployment Activities (PANDA) project is refining its existing technology to track the location and patterns of more than 100,000 vessels and to detect when ships and boats deviate from normally expected behavior.
Suspicious behavior
As such, the PANDA research is similar to other systems that use exception detection to pinpoint unusual behavior by people in airports or train stations. Developers of those counterterrorism systems have carved out the task of teaching systems what types of events to watch for among the countless mundane activities observed via video cameras in the transportation hubs.
Like the PANDA system, the exception-detection software for airports flags unusual events — such as an errant freighter in one case or an unattended satchel in the other — and brings them to the attention of human analysts.
At the edges of computer science, DARPA is approaching the problem of attracting and cultivating talent to the field of computer science partly by asking promising students to choose projects that strike them as interesting and attractive.
“One of the ideas the students liked is Programmable Matter,” Tether told the congressional subcommittee members. “It is an important idea that is of significant relevance to DOD. The challenge is to build a solid object out of intelligent parts that could be programmed so that it can transform itself into other physical objects in three dimensions. It would do this by changing its color, shape or other characteristics.”
The programmable matter project could, for instance, lead to the invention of a malleable antenna that could change its shape depending on the radio or radar to which it is connected, Tether said.
“The computer science challenges are to identify the algorithms that would allow each element of the object to do its job as the object changes, while staying well coordinated with the other elements and functioning as an ensemble,” he added.
DARPA throws down the challenge on cognitive computing
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s research in the field of cognitive computing could progress to the point of a Grand Challenge that would pit alternate methods of building brainlike systems against one another.
The agency’s Biologically-Inspired Cognitive Architecture program is pushing artificial intelligence in the direction of building software that mimics human brain functions.
BICA relies on recent advances in cognitive psychology and the science of the human brain’s biological structure to build software that comes much closer to human abilities than previous AI. The research agency’s Information Processing Technology Office is leading the BICA research process by funding research teams based mainly at universities.
AI traces its roots back to designs such as expert systems and neural networks, familiar since the 1980s, which held out the promise of transforming information technology by adopting human learning and thinking methods. Those classic AI approaches proved to be useful in some commercial and government systems but were less effective than conventional IT architectures for most uses.
BICA’s leaders note that AI progress has been slow and steady in recent decades. “However, we have fallen short of creating systems with genuine artificial intelligence — ones that can learn from experience and adapt to changing conditions in the way that humans can,” according to DARPA. “We are able to engineer specialized software solutions for almost any well-defined problem, but our systems still lack the general, flexible learning abilities of human cognition.”
The BICA program has completed its first phase, which commissioned eight research teams to combine recent findings in brain biology and psychology to help build blueprints for functioning computers that could learn and understand like people. In the second phase of the five-year BICA program, which is now under way, the military research agency is seeking proposals for vendor teams to develop and test models of human cognition, or thinking, based on the architectures built in the program’s first year.
DARPA has not yet announced plans for a grand challenge competition to pit the resulting AI-like systems against one another. But vendor documents submitted in response to BICA’s first phase refer to an anticipated challenge stage of the program.
The University of Maryland at College Park provided one of the computer architectures for the first phase of the BICA program, basing some of its research on methods of designing a mobile system that could learn the various skills DARPA seeks in a cognitive system. “We are ultimately interested in [designing] an agent that captures many of the abilities of a child, and thus do not focus on a large initial knowledge base,” the University of Maryland computer scientists wrote.
“We keep the environment and input/ output to the system relatively simple so that we can focus on the primary issue of integrating those components and not the important but low-level details that will eventually need to be addressed,” according to their blueprint.
The 14 Future Icon technology areas, as described in testimony by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Director Tony Tether before a House committee:
Networks: Self-forming, robust, self-defending networks at the strategic and tactical level are the key to network-centric warfare.
Chip-Scale Atomic Clock: Miniaturizing an atomic clock to fit on a chip to provide very accurate time as required, for instance, in assured network communications.
Global War on Terrorism: Technologies to identify and defeat terrorist activities such as the manufacture and deployment of improvised explosive devices and other asymmetric activities.
Air Vehicles: Manned and unmanned air vehicles that quickly arrive at their mission station and can remain there for very long periods.
Space: The U.S. military’s ability to use space is one of its major strategic advantages, and DARPA is working to ensure the United States maintains that advantage.
High-Productivity Computing Systems: DARPA is working to maintain the U.S. global lead in supercomputing, which is fundamental to a variety of military operations, from weather forecasting to cryptography to the design of new weapons.
Real-Time Accurate Language Translation: Real-time machine language translation of text and speech with near-expert human translation accuracy.
Biological Warfare Defense: Technologies to dramatically accelerate the development and production of vaccines and other medical therapeutics from 12 years to only 12 weeks.
Prosthetics: Developing prosthetics that can be controlled and perceived by the brain, just as with a natural limb.
Quantum Information Science: Exploiting quantum phenomena in the fields of computing, cryptography and communications, with the promise of opening new frontiers in each area.
Newton’s Laws for Biology: DARPA’s Fundamental Laws of Biology program is working to bring deeper mathematical understanding and accompanying predictive ability to the field of biology, with the goal of discovering fundamental laws of biology that extend across all size scales.
Low-Cost Titanium: A completely revolutionary technology for extracting titanium from ore and fabricating it promises to dramatically reduce the cost for military-grade titanium alloy, making it practical for many more applications.
Alternative Energy: Technologies to help reduce the military’s reliance on petroleum.
High-Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System: Novel, compact, high-power lasers making practical small-size and low-weight speed-of-light weapons for tactical mobile air and ground vehicles.
NSA pushes for adoption of elliptic-curve encryption, whose greater security and shorter key lengths will help secure small, mobile devices
The cryptographic security standards used in public-key infrastructures, RSA and Diffie-Hellman, were introduced in the 1970s. And although they haven’t been cracked, their time could be running out.
That’s one reason the National Security Agency wants to move to elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) for cybersecurity by 2010, the year the National Institute of Standards and Technology plans to recommend all government agencies move to ECC, said Dickie George, technology director at NSA’s information assurance directorate.
Another reason is that current standards would have to continually extend their key lengths to ensure security, which increases processing time and could make it difficult to secure small devices. ECC can provide greater security with shorter keys, experts say.
The switch to ECC will be neither quick nor painless. It will require mass replacement of hardware and software to be compatible with ECC and new NSA cybersecurity standards.
In fact, the 2010 goal might not be realistic for NSA, where more than a million different pieces of equipment will need to be moved to ECC, George said. NSA’s move could potentially take as long as 10 years to complete, given the project’s complexity and scope. The agency has not set a specific deadline for completing its Cryptographic Modernization initiative, started in 2001 and recognizes that cybersecurity will always be a moving target, he said. The move to ECC is part of the initiative.
ECC, a complex mathematical algorithm used to secure data in transit, will replace RSA and Diffie-Hellman because it can provide much greater security at a smaller key size. ECC takes less computational time and can be used to secure information on smaller machines, including cell phones, smart cards and wireless devices.
The specifics of the changeover were announced in 2005 with NSA’s release of its Suite B Cryptography standards. Suite B falls under NSA’s Cryptographic Modernization initiative and details ECC usage for public keys and digital signatures. The announcement, the first related to cryptographic standards in 30 years, was a watershed event, said Bill Lattin, chief technology officer at Certicom, a pioneer in ECC.
NSA has licensed approximately 25 of Certicom’s ECC patents for use by the government and vendors that develop defense products.
The move to ECC represents a new way of doing business for the NSA. The Cryptographic Modernization initiative “is not just replacing the old with the new. We are upgrading the entire way we do communications,” George said.
Interoperability is the core of the new communications program and the reason for the modernization initiative. NSA plans to work closely with other governments, U.S. departments and agencies, first responders, and the commercial sector, George said. To do so, the agency needs public-key algorithms to securely transmit information among all parties, he said.
“If you go back 30 years, things weren’t nearly as interoperable as they are now. In today’s world, everything is being networked. We have to allow interoperability. And the cryptography has to match [among devices] because if it doesn’t, it is not going to be interoperable,” George said.
These interoperability goals will most likely extend across federal, state and local governments in addition to law enforcement agencies nationwide.
Although RSA and Diffie-Hellman are both public-key algorithms, experts say they don’t scale well for the future. To make RSA and Diffie-Hellman keys, which now can go to 1,024 bits, secure for the next 10 to 20 years, organizations would have to expand to key lengths of at least 2,048 bits, said Stephen Kent, chief scientist at BBN Technologies. Eventually, key sizes would need to expand to 4,096 bits. “That’s enormous keys. To do the math operations underlying the keys takes longer and is more computationally intensive,” Kent said.
Thus, NSA’s decision to move to ECC, which appears to be the only option. Experts agree that there is no new technology comparable to ECC. Although there are a number of protocols, there are only two basic technology approaches, George said: integers, used by RSA and Diffie-Hellman, and ECC, he said.
“ECC is the only impressive thing out there,” Kent said. “People don’t get excited every time a new thing comes along. We wait several years and let people try to crack it first. ECC definitely passed the test in this regard.”
NIST, which develops government- wide cybersecurity standards, also sees a need to move to ECC, although its recommendations are less stringent than NSA’s, whose ECC guidelines are a subset of NIST’s.
“I’m pretty sure [RSA and Diffie-Hellman] will be broken within a decade or so,” said Bill Burr, manager of NIST’s security technology group. “We are trying to end the use for most purposes of RSA and Diffie-Hellman with 1,000-bit keys by the end of 2010. And if you are real conservative, we are late.”.
“NSA has been fairly aggressive to standardize on ECC,” Burr said. We are slower, partly because we think it will naturally happen anyhow.”
John Pescatore, vice president and analyst at Gartner, does not see a need for the average user to switch to ECC unless it is to take advantage of its smaller size, such as securing cell phones and smart cards. With NSA, those technologies might include “things that a soldier carries around…and [has] strict limits on power consumption,” Pescatore said.
Burr expects ECC to become a universal standard by 2020, when most ECC patents owned by Certicom expire. “If it’s not a big problem today, it may be hard for the CIO to motivate people to transition to ECC,” said Kent.
DARPA’s Grand Challenge moves downtown, where teams will test their vehicles against city traffic
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s competition for autonomous vehicles has seen great leaps forward in its first two incarnations. This year, the ride could get rather bumpy, as the Grand Challenge moves from the expanses of the desert to the mean streets of the city.
The competition, called the Urban Challenge for 2007, is no mere sporting event. DARPA’s goal is to use the challenge to help develop technologies for self-guiding military vehicles that could reduce the deadly toll of vehicular-related battlefield casualties among U.S. military personnel.
Approximately half the U.S. soldiers killed to date in Iraq have died in enemy attacks on vehicles, whether by live enemy fire or by improvised explosive devices or, to a lesser extent, in vehicular accidents.
Based on results from the two previous Grand Challenges and a preliminary look at the entrants in DARPA’s Urban Challenge contest now under way, “we think that over time we will be able to build vehicles that will be able to drive as well as humans in certain situations,” said Norman Whitaker, program manager for DARPA’s Urban Challenge.
In May, DARPA trimmed the roster of teams competing in the Urban Challenge from 89 to 53 and will further narrow the field to 30 semifinalists this week based on scores issued during site visits DARPA officials have been conducting since May. The agency also will name this week the location of the competition’s Qualification Event scheduled for Oct. 26 to 31 and the location for the final contest Nov. 3.
To date, DARPA has said only that both events would take place in the western United States, although its placement in a simulated urban combat zone has become the theme of this year’s contest and considerably upped the ante for the level of vehicle proficiency that will be required to successfully complete the contest’s 60-mile course in six hours.
The complexities of a city environment and the introduction this year of other moving vehicles along the course increases exponentially the sophistication of the sensing, data processing and guidance technologies required, Whitaker said.
DARPA’s goal in its successive challenges is to raise the bar each time, he said, although the addition of moving traffic represents the biggest obstacle ever added to the contest.
The first Grand Challenge in 2004 ran over a 142-mile course in the desert, but the competition looked more like the Keystone Cops than Knight Rider — no vehicle made it past the eight-mile mark. Still, DARPA officials said they saw promise, which came to fruition in 2005, when four vehicles covered a 132-mile desert course. With those results, the decision was made to take the Grand Challenge downtown.
With an urban setting and traffic, vehicles “have to make decisions fast, so we’ve speeded up the timeframe” in which vehicles must receive sensor data, process it and respond, all without human intervention, Whitaker said. “As usual, we’ve taken it to the nth degree and said we want full autonomy. By [asking for an extreme], we get a lot of the middle ground covered.”
The placement of this year’s contest in a dynamic setting creates challenges unheard of in previous challenges and requires technological advancements that will bring self-guided vehicles to a near reality, participants say.
“This year we have moving objectives and that dynamic interaction is new and very difficult,” said Gary Schmiedel, vice president of the advanced product engineering group at Oshkosh Truck, one of the corporate entrants in this year’s Urban Challenge and one of the teams that successfully completed the 132-mile course in 2005. “This brings us much closer to a real-world application of the technology and means that we have to build a truck that’s as versatile as you or I would be.”
At the level of sophistication that will be required in this year’s contest, “this is really a software competition, not a hardware competition,” said David Stavens, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University who’s working on Stanford’s entry in the Urban Challenge and was a co-creator of Stanley, the modified Volkswagen Touareg sport utility vehicle that won DARPA’s 2005 Grand Challenge for Stanford University.
The Stanford team, consequently, is spending much of its time this year working on probabilistic algorithms and machine learning capabilities and is tackling the problem with help from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stavens said. Probabilistic algorthms will help this year’s Stanford entry, Junior, a Volkswagen Passat station wagon, deal with uncertainties along the course, while machine learning will enable the team to program the car with human-like driving skills.
“By driving other roads, you can gain enough knowledge that the robot will be able to handle the Urban Challenge course just fine,” Stavens said. “This is a very rich subset of the skills that you and I would use when we jump in our own cars and go driving, but this type of technology can save our soldiers’ lives in the battlefield and save lives in the civilian world.”
After this year’s challenge, DARPA will evaluate whether the contests have advanced the technology enough to make commercial production of autonomous vehicles for the military feasible and economically practical, Whitaker said. After an experiment along the lines of the challenges, “there’s an intermediate phase before [the military] goes out and starts buying systems. It could also be that we’ll need to see more work on the commercial side,” he said.
Teams build on technologies from past challenges
As the agency that created the Internet and nurtured it through its early years, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a long history of transferring its technical innovations from military to civilian use. The Grand Challenge will likely prove to be another example.
Although the challenge’s primary goal is developing driverless military vehicles, DARPA has organized the competitions with the expectation that technologies created for them will be applied in the private sector, too.
Many of the corporate Grand Challenge participants, in fact, look at it as an opportunity to test and perfect — in demanding military conditions — technologies they will later adapt for industrial or civilian use.
Velodyne Acoustics, a maker of high-fidelity stereo and home theater equipment, entered the 2005 Grand Challenge and invented laser-based sensors for its vehicle that it has now sold to participants in the 2007 Urban Challenge.
The company also is marketing its invention to prospects in several industries, said Michael Dunbar, Velodyne’s business development manager.
David Hall, the company’s founder, chief executive officer and chief engineer, along with his brother, Bruce, Velodyne’s president, entered a vehicle in the 2005 Grand Challenge as Team DAD (for Digital Audio Drive). While working on the project, they identified shortcomings with the laser-based light, distancing and ranging (Lidar) scanners used alone or in combination with cameras as the eyes in the guidance systems of autonomous vehicles, Dunbar said. Lidar systems available on the market at the time scanned for objects only along a single, fixed line of sight.
In response to those limitations, David Hall, an avid inventor, created his own Lidar scanner consisting of an assembly of 64 lasers spinning at 300 to 900 rotations per second capable of detecting objects anywhere in a 360-degree horizontal field. The Velodyne Lidar assembly produces 1 million data points per second, compared to the 5,000 data points a second of earlier systems.
Velodyne doesn’t have a vehicle in this year’s Urban Challenge but has sold its HDL-64 Lidar scanner to 10 Challenge participants that have included it on their vehicles, either alone or in conjunction with optical sensors, Dunbar said. “Some of the teams can use our sensor and eliminate other types of sensors so [the sensor data] is much easier for them to manipulate,” he said.
By setting its own benchmarks for supercomputing systems, DOD gets better performance — and might change how HPC systems are procured
Twice a year, work being done by the world’s fastest supercomputers comes to a screeching halt so the systems can run a benchmark called Linpack to determine how fast they are, at least in relation to one another. Linpack — which measures how many trillions of floating-point operations per second the machine is capable of executing — is the benchmark used to rank the fastest supercomputers in the world, in the twice-annual Top 500 List.
As an exercise in flexing muscle, Linpack is about as useful as any other benchmark. But as a tool for judging supercomputing systems in a procurement process, it is limited at best. The Defense Department, through its High Performance Computing Modernization Program, is shaking up the supercomputing world by applying a more disciplined approach to purchasing big iron.
Instead of using a generic benchmark to compare models, the program issues a set of metrics that carefully codifies its own workload. Program leaders then ask vendors to respond with the best — yet most cost-effective — systems they can provide to execute such a workload.
“We don’t specify how big the machine is,” said Cray Henry, head of the program. “We will run a sample problem of a fixed size, and call the result our target time. We then put a bid on the street and say we want you to build a machine that will run this twice as fast.” It is up to the vendor to figure out how that machine should achieve those results.
Sounds simple, but in the field of supercomputers, this common-sense approach is rather radical.
“It’s a well-oiled process,” agreed Alison Ryan, vice president of business development at SGI. She said that for vendors, “this kind of procurement is actually difficult. It takes a lot of nontrivial work. It’s easier to do a procurement based on Linpack.” But in the end, the work is worthwhile for both DOD and the vendor, because “it’s actually getting the right equipment for your users.”
“They’ve done a great job on the program in institutionalizing the [request for proposal] process,” said Peter Ungaro, chief executive officer at supercomputer company Cray.
DOD created HPCMP in 1994 as a way to pool resources for supercomputing power. Instead of having each of the services buy supercomputers for its own big jobs, the services could collectively buy an array of machines that could handle a wider variety of tasks, including large tasks.
On the rise
Today, the program has an annual budget of about $250 million, including $50 million for procuring two new supercomputers. Eight HPCMP shared-resource centers, which house the systems, tackle about 600 projects submitted by 4,600 users from the military services, academia and industry.
As of December 2006, the program had control of machines that could do a total of 315.5 teraflops, and that number grows by a quarter each year, as the oldest machines are replaced or augmented by newer technologies.
And over the years, the program has developed a painstakingly thorough process of specifying what kind of systems it needs.
What about HPCMP is so different? It defines its users’ workload, rather than use a set of generic performance goals.
Henry said that most of the workloads on the program’s systems can fall into one of about 10 categories, such as computational fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, chemistry and materials science, climate modeling and simulation, and electromagnetics. Each job has a unique performance characteristic and can be best run on a unique combination of processors, memory, interconnects and software. “This is better because it gauges true workload,” Ryan said.
To quantify these types of jobs, HPCMP came up with a computer program called the linear optimizer, which calculates the overall system performance for handling each of these jobs. It weights each job by how often it is executed. It also factors in the price of each system and existing systems that can already execute those tasks.
Once numbers have been generated for each proposed system, the program takes usability into consideration. Henry admitted that is hard to quantify, but it includes factors such as what sorts of third-party software is available for the platform and what sorts of compilers, debuggers and other development tools are available.
Once these performance and usability numbers are calculated, they are weighted against the past performance of the vendors. From there, the answer of which system may be the right one may be obvious — or it may come down to a narrow choice between a handful of systems.
“It’s not often they need the same type of system year after year,” Ungaro said.
Bottom line
Although DOD generally is well- represented on the twice-annual list of the world’s fastest computers — it had 11 in the June 2007 Top 100 ranking, for instance — the true beneficiaries are the researchers who can use the machines. The biggest benefit? “Time to solution,” Henry said.
DOD might need to know the performance characteristics of an airplane fuselage. Using a very accurate simulation saves money and time from testing actual fuselages.
“Typically, the kind of equations we’re trying to solve require from dozens to thousands of differential calculations,” Henry said. And each equation “can require a tremendous number of iterations.”
Imagine executing a single problem a million or even tens of millions of times at once, with each execution involving thousands of calculations. That’s the size of the job these systems usually handle.
DOD has many problems to test against. Programs track toxic releases of gas spread across an environment. They help develop better algorithms for tracking targets on the ground from moving radars. They speed development of missiles. In one example, supercomputing shortened the development time of the Hellfire missile to just 13 months, allowing it to be deployed in Iraq two years earlier than otherwise would have been possible.
By providing the fastest computing power available, the program in its modest way can assure the Defense Department stays ahead of the enemy.
Online Activity Tracked Without Explicit Consent
The Washington Post reports today about the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s ongoing inquiry into the online tracking activity of various internet companies. The Post reports that some internet companies have been using targeted-advertising technology without the explicit consent of consumers. More than a third of the 33 companies that received letters have indicated they do not conduct behavioral advertising – advertising based on users’ internet activity based on deep packet inspection.
This investigation started with the Committee sending a letter to Embarq Corporation about a online advertising test conducted with their internet users. The committee also held a hearing on deep packet inspection and it’s privacy implications, which we noted earlier on this blog. The Committee followed this with letters to additional companies, which can be viewed online along with an explanatory press release. The committee has also posted responses that they have received to date. I should note, however, that the link to those letters is not readily available from the Committee’s website – I accessed it through the link in the Washington Post article. Google has made their letter available through their public policy blog.
(more…)
U.S. tracking citizens’ border crossings
Reuters
Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
The U.S. government has been using its border checkpoints to collect information on citizens that will be stored for 15 years, raising concern among privacy advocates, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials said the collection is part of a broader effort to guard against terrorist threats, the report said, citing a Federal Register notice the agency issued last month.
Officials said the disclosure is among a series of notices to make the department’s data gathering more transparent, the newspaper reported.
A notice by Customs and Border Protection, a DHS agency, said it does not perform data mining on border crossings to search for patterns that could signal a terrorist or law enforcement threat, according to the Post.
But it states that information may be shared with federal, state and local governments to test “new technology and systems designed to enhance border security or identify other violations of law,” the Post reported.
A DHS spokesman was not immediately available for comment on the report.
Google Android wants to be on any device, not just your phone
Google’s much anticipated Android mobile phone operating system, due to launch within the next few weeks, may actually be much more than a mobile OS. Industry sources tell us that although Android will indeed start as a mobile OS, Google intends to expand it to be a sort of universal operating system that will span set-top boxes for televisions, mp3 players and other communication and media devices and services.
Rumors about this plan have actually been circulating since last year. Google “chief internet evangelist” and Internet co-creator Vint Cerf hinted at Google’s larger focus during a talk on innovation journalism that we attended in 2006, before Android existed:
In an internet enabled world, there is no reason that a projector could not be online and downloading images, maybe using the Blackberry as a control device. Surrounded by networked equipment that is reachable anywhere, devices harnessed on a temporary basis to do something for you and then released. I am predicting that during this decade, we will see more systems interacting with other systems like this….
Another clue that Google’ has bigger things in store for Android: Android creator Andy Rubin was working on a digital camera before he started Android; co-worker Rich Miner convinced him to go to mobile in order to make money. Android is built on Linux, the open source software that’s already used in other desktop and mobile operating systems. This allows it to be easily repurposed for devices besides phones.
This is where some of Google’s other initiatives could come in, one source speculates. If the wider-ranging operating system is really what Google is doing with Android, well, the App Engine, Google’s web hosting and support service for developers, wouldn’t just be about helping web developers, it would provide services for Android developers. And, Google is also constantly improving the artificial intelligence capacity of its search engine, its spam filtering in Gmail, and a range of other services — Google is creating a supercomputer, driven by artificial intelligence. Through Android, it could let these developers build applications that use its brain. What’s more, this could explain why Google has been experimenting with free WiFi in Mountain View (which is pretty great, by the way), and with other wireless transmission experiments. It wants to create an ecosystem that relies on communication between any two devices. In some cases, maybe it wants to help your Android phone talk to, say, an Android-connected overhead projector.
Google already faces major competitors. The iPhone, the attention-grabbing leader in mobile software, is already being used as a sort of universal remote for Apple products, including iTunes and Apple TV. But Apple’s SDK gives restricted access to “small” developers. Microsoft, meanwhile, has a similarly grand vision of connecting all your devices with its Live Mesh platform, but it isn’t focusing on mobile, and the realization of this goal is a long way off. [Update: John Furrier has more analysis on Android versus Microsoft and others, on Broaddev.com.]
To make Android truly valuable, Google needs to have an active ecosystem of third party developers building useful applications, just as what happened with Microsoft’s desktop operating system, and is happening now on the iPhone.
But Google isn’t focused on the rank-and-file developers yet. It’s targeting the mobile operators and handset makers from the Open Handset Alliance — in fact, these partners have been given early access, sources say, to the version of the Android SDK that we’ve heard is slated to launch publicly in a few weeks. It understands it needs to offer them an ecosystem they can live with, before it moves to help smaller players.
Just look at the numbers. There were slightly less than 6 million users before the iPhone 3G launch. In the United States alone, T-Mobile has 30.5 million subscribers. T-Mobile plans to launch its HTC phones in stages, internationally (USA & Europe). From what we hear, Germany will be an early market, so add another 27 million subscribers to the comparison. If the system will work for T-Mobile and HTC, you can be sure others will follow.
For now, Google is in anti-PR mode. “It doesn’t want to have a dead cat found,” as one source puts it. There are many reasons for that. The Android team is small and so secretive, and from what we hear, not many people at Google headquarters know about what it is working on. Google understands that it needs to make its OHA partners look good. It appears to be leaving all press decisions to OHA members, including T-Mobile, which may explain the most recent stories about T-Mobile’s pending Android-powered phone.
So, the Android-powered HTC phone expected to launch in the next few weeks could continue to hurt Google’s standing . The blogosphere hasn’t treated Android well — the SDK has taken many months to get to this stage since it was announced last year. The anti-Android trend will likely continue as commentators compare the HTC and the iPhone (the iPhone is better), and also say the U.S. T-Mobile network is bad (it is). But that’s all besides the point. There will be more phones coming out. The Android SDK appears to be much more powerful, and the distribution possibilities will eventually be better as more mobile operators join the OHA — and as Android expands to other devices.
Bush administration compiling massive database of bank records
Bush administration compiling massive database of bank records
The Bush administration has been secretly tapping into a global network of confidential financial transactions and compiling a vast database of bank records. According to an article in the June 23 New York Times, the program was initiated shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and has examined banking transactions involving tens of thousands of individuals in the US and internationally.
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Administration officials asked the Times not publish its story. When the Times went ahead with it, the White House denounced the newspaper, implying that by informing the American and international public of the massive and warrentless intrusion of privacy it was aiding and abetting the terrorists. We are disappointed that once again the New York Times has chosen to expose a classified program that is working to protect Americans, Bush administration spokeswoman Dana Perino said. We know that Al Qaeda watches for any clue as to how we are fighting the war on terrorism and then they adapt.
Exposure of the government spying on bank records follows revelations of far-reaching secret spying operations on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA) involving eavesdropping on telephone calls, emails and faxes without the benefit of court-issued warrants and the assembling of a database, again without court warrants, covering hundreds of millions of domestic telephone calls. The Justice Department has also requested that Internet providers keep two-year records of web sites their customers visit and addresses to which they send email.
As with the previously exposed spying programs, the Bush administration is using the so-called war on terrorism as the pretext for implementing, in the form of the SWIFT program, another unconstitutional and illegal assault on democratic rights. The piecemeal revelation of such programs provides only a glimpse of the vast infrastructure for police-state forms of rule that has been put in place.
Read More
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/spy-j24.shtml
*”Everybodys Gotta Learn Sometime” 9/11 Study Guide
This is an older 9/11 film that focuses on things like the hijackers and their financiers, instead of the typical physics type stuff found in most 9/11 documentaries. This guide here should cover every single claim and citation in the film, allowing you to check his work point by point.
I originally built this guide in May of 2006. I had to fix a ton of links. Since many of the links are Google search strings, many of them should still work out alright even in cases where there have been further developments. After doing this work I intended on building these for essentially all the more powerful documentaries out there, but then, months later I began making my own films and lost the time for such. So I recommend that those who have time use this model here to help all the films out there have far more effectiveness.
NOTE: Many of my copy-paste’s from my old Myspace blog are defecting the paragraph formatting. I’ve tried fixing these the easy way to no avail, and don’t have time to go in and manually hack the code.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9007079754355711945
EGLS Research Guide:
Case 1: Project for the New American Century
Case 2: Florida Election
-2000 Election -ChoicePoint (see also) -John Bolton -Staged Riot
See also: 2000 Election Videos
Case 3: Huffman Aviation
-Able Danger -Jeb Bush & Wally Hilliard -Huffman Aviation -Highjackers trained at military bases -Atta trained at Maxwell AFB -Yeslam bin Laden -Rudy Dekkers -Discover Air -INS -Venezuela
See also: Mohamad Atta and the Venice Flying Circus (abridged) [Video]
Case 4: San Diego
-San Diego -Abdussattar Shaikh -Phony PHD -American Commonwealth University
Case 5: Secured Visas
-15 Hijackers -Visa Express -Richard Armitage
Case 6: Intelligence Breakdowns and Coverups
-Robert Wright -Coleen Rowley -Michael Maltbie -Harry Samit -Sibel Edmonds -Able Danger -Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer -Defense Intelligence Agency -Yellow Stickers -911 Commission -Rep. Curt Weldon -Commander Scott Philpot -Slade Gorton -2.5 Terabytes
See also:
Rep. Curt Weldon – Presentation Showing Able Danger Chart
Rep. Curt Weldon Alleges 9/11 Cover-Up
Curt Weldon FBI Raid
Curt Weldon Outs Anonymous Sources
BBC 9/11 “hitpiece” admits there was a 9/11 Coverup
Case 7: Gamblers Scandals
-Jack Abramoff -Rep. Tom Delay -Sun Cruz -Gus Boulis -Adam Kidan -Superbowl -Atta on Sun Cruz -Vegas Strip Clubs
Case 8: Foreknowledge
-Willie Brown -Top Pentagon Officials -John Ashcroft -Salman Rushdie -Insider Trading -Buzzy Krongard -A.B. Brown trading -Money Laundering -In-Q-Tel
Case 9: Terrorist Money Trail
-Pakistan Money -General Mahmud Ahmed -Ahmad Umar Sheikh -Daniel Pearle -Sen. Bob Graham -Rep. Porter Goss -911 Joint Congressional Inquiry
Case 10: Warnings
-23 warnings from 11 governments -George Tenet -Ashcroft -Tom Pickard -John Oneill -Bush Memo -Fl. Executive Order 01-261
Case 11: Air Defenseless
-War Games & Drills Timeline -Cassette Tape -Shocking Event -Pentagon Renovation Program -Hani Hanjour -Michael Meacher -Paul Hellyer -Andreas von Bulow -Robert M. Bowman -General Myers -Sen. Max Cleland -General Montague Winfield
See also: Patriots Question 9/11
See Also:
Infowars Prior Knowledge Database
Cooperative Research Complete 911 Timelines
9/11 conspiracy theories – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Privacy fear as Google plans ’super database’
JOHN INNES / Scotsman | March 8 2006
GOOGLE, the internet giant, is planning a massive online facility that could store copies of users’ hard drives – a move set to spark alarm among civil liberties campaigners.
Plans for the “GDrive”, previously the subject of rumour among computer experts, were revealed accidentally after notes in a slideshow were wrongly published on Google’s site.
The device would create a mirror image of data stored on consumers’ computer hard drives, letting users search data stored on other computers via Google accounts.
While offering more convenient access to data, the service will stoke debate about the dangers of storing so much personal data on Google systems. Google recently squared up against the United States Justice Department, which has subpoenaed a limited set of data on Google search habits, drawing an outcry from privacy advocates.
In the presentation notes, the chief executive, Eric Schmidt, made a cryptic comment that one goal of Google was to “store 100 per cent” of consumer information”.
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on any specific service, but confirmed that the presentation containing the notes had been mistakenly released on the internet. “We deleted the slide notes because they were not intended for publication,” she said.
“We are constantly working on ways to enhance our products and services for users, but have nothing to announce at this time.”
The new service could save computer users from loss of data by keeping a “golden copy” on Google’s centralised computers. However, the plan could be thwarted by privacy concerns.
Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocate, issued a similarly stern warning to consumers to not use such facilities because it would reduce their level of privacy protection.
Google has been at the centre of privacy row in the United States. Last August, Google rejected US government efforts to access its search logs to prop up a contested 1998 law designed to protect minors from objectionable material on the internet.
Microsoft, Yahoo, and America Online have all since admitted that they have provided the government with some of that data from their logs.
The revelations triggered a privacy rights row in Washington that has placed the administration of the president, George Bush, on the defensive and has sparked at least two investigations in Congress.
UPDATE
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-04-n51.html
Evidence of GDrive in Google Apps
By Tony Ruscoe
Rumors of an online storage solution from Google have been circulating for years. These rumors became stronger in July last year when references to Platypus and GDrive were accidentally made available on the writely.com domain. A few months later, Google’s internal Platypus client was leaked and people started to question whether GDrive would ever be made available publicly – especially when it was suggested recently that the GDrive release may have been delayed or canceled.
Earlier today, I stumbled across some more evidence which may further support rumors that GDrive will be made available publicly, possibly as part of Google Apps, though it could just mean that Google uses GDrive internally as part of Google Apps.
Anyone familiar with my previous Google-digging will know that I try to keep track of Google service names used by both Google Accounts and Google Apps. By changing query string parameters on various pages, it’s possible to get a glimpse into what Google might be working on. Many of the service code names I’ve discovered in the past have been released several months or years later, while others are still unreleased or remain to be a complete mystery.
What I discovered today was that Google Apps accounts allow you to change the query string parameter on the page where you can disable services. By changing the “service” parameter, I was given the option to disable GDrive on my account (even though it wasn’t currently enabled):
For anyone with their own Google Apps domain, you can try the following URL after replacing “example.com” with your own domain and signing in:
https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/example.com/DisableService?service=www10
(Note: This also works for YouTube – service=youtube – and Google Video – service=videoonline – even though those services aren’t readily available to Google Apps accounts.)
In May this year, after being redirected from www10.google.com and prompted to sign in to a service called WWW10, I asked on my blog, “What is Google WWW10?” Upon further inspection, visiting www10.google.com tries to set the following cookie in the 302 response header:
PlatypusData=EXPIRED;Path=/;Expires=Mon, 01-Jan-1990 00:00:00 GMT
So what does this mean exactly? I guess it means that the mysterious WWW10 service is likely to be GDrive or Platypus and that it’s possibly going to be available to Google Apps users. Of course, we shouldn’t forget that Google uses Google Apps themselves, so it’s also possible that GDrive is only enabled for the google.com Google Apps account and is only meant to be used internally.
Of course, it could also mean that we’re one more step closer to GDrive being released to everyone…
Update: It seems that www10.google.com no longer tries to set this cookie or redirect to the WWW10 login page. Is Google trying to hide something? [Thanks Luka!]
Update 2: And now Google has disabled the “DisableService” page for all services that you can’t yet add to your Google Apps account – which includes ah, cf, fensi, jotspot, sitemaps, videoonline, voice, www10 and youtube. The “DisableService” page does, however, still appear for the other services even if you have not yet added them to your account.
Domestic Spying: The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story – Again (Greg Palast)
by Greg Palast
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/05/con06189.html
I know your shocked — SHOCKED! — that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That’s nothing. And it’s not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration’s Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI — though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
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For the full story, see “Double Cheese With Fear,” in Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.”
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The leader in the field of what is called “data mining,” is a company, formed , called, “ChoicePoint, Inc,” which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain’t nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans — and I know they’ve expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you — because the FBI can’t. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you’re suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for “commercial” purchases — and under the Bush Administration’s suspect reading of the Patriot Act — our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?
ChoicePoint’s board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone — even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 “felons” that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida’s voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they’ve since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint’s ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply assuaged by the man the company elected.
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, “hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]” from medical to voting records.
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds — but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was “the number one” provider of DNA info to the FBI.
” And that scares the hell out of me,” said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It’s more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida “felons,” Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test “results” on rape case evidence that didn’t exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.
But it won’t stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about “surveillance” of innocent Americans. That’s because FEAR is a lucrative business — not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin — each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).
But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex — and they want you to be afraid. Back to today’s New York Times, page 28: “Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime.” And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.
” Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family,” says the Times — which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.
It doesn’t end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won’t stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone’s going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.
The knuckleheads at the Times don’t put the three stories together because the real players aren’t in the press releases their reporters re-write.
But that’s the Fear Industry for you. You aren’t safer from terrorists or criminals or “felon” voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.
And that’s their program. They get the data mine — and we get the shaft.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Greg Palast is author of Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War, out June 6. You can order it now.
The Total Information Awareness Project Lives On
Original logo of the now-defunct Total Information Awareness Office, which drew much criticism for its “spooky” images.
Technology behind the Pentagon’s controversial data-mining project has been acquired by NSA, and is probably in use.
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16741&ch=infotech
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
In April, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the advocacy organization for citizens’ digital rights, filed evidence to support its class-action lawsuit alleging that telecom giant AT&T gave the National Security Agency (NSA), the ultra-secret U.S. agency that’s the world’s largest espionage organization, unfettered access to Americans’ telephone and Internet communications. The lawsuit is one more episode in the public controversy that erupted in December 2005, when the New York Times revealed that, following September 11, President Bush authorized a far-reaching NSA surveillance program that included warrantless electronic eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mails of individuals within the United States.
Critics charged that the Bush administration had violated both the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against unwarranted search or seizure, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which requires eavesdropping warrants to be obtained from a special court of judges empowered for that purpose.
In February 2006, the controversy intensified. Reports emerged that component technologies of the supposedly defunct Total Information Awareness (TIA) project — established in 2002 by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop advanced information technology to counter terrorists, then terminated by Congress in 2003 because of widespread criticism that it would create “Orwellian” mass surveillance — had been acquired by the NSA.
Washington’s lawmakers ostensibly killed the TIA project in Section 8131 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal 2004. But legislators wrote a classified annex to that document which preserved funding for TIA’s component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies, say sources who have seen the document, according to reports first published in The National Journal. Congress did stipulate that those technologies should only be used for military or foreign intelligence purposes against non-U.S. citizens. Still, while those component projects’ names were changed, their funding remained intact, sometimes under the same contracts.
Thus, two principal components of the overall TIA project have migrated to the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), which is housed somewhere among the 60-odd buildings of “Crypto City,” as NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD, is nicknamed. One of the TIA components that ARDA acquired, the Information Awareness Prototype System, was the core architecture that would have integrated all the information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. According to The National Journal, it was renamed “Basketball.” The other, Genoa II, used information technologies to help analysts and decision makers anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks. It was renamed “Topsail.”
Has the NSA been employing those TIA technologies in its surveillance within the United States? And what exactly is the agency doing, anyway?
The hearings that the Senate Judiciary Committee convened in February to consider the NSA’s surveillance gave some clues. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, maintaining the administration’s defense against charges that it violated the Fourth Amendment and FISA, told senators, firstly, that Article II of the U.S. Constitution granted a president authority to conduct such monitoring and, secondly, that the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) passed after September 11 specified that the president could “use all necessary and appropriate force” to prevent future terrorist acts. Regarding FISA, Gonzalez claimed, the NSA had sidestepped its requirements to obtain warrants for electronic eavesdropping in particular cases. But, overall, the attorney general said, FISA worked well and the authorities had used it increasingly. The available facts support Gonzalez’s contention: while the FISA court issued about 500 warrants per year from 1979 through 1995, in 2004 (the last year for which public records exist) 1,758 warrants were issued.
But when senators asked why, given the fact that FISA had provisions by which government agents could wiretap first and seek warrants later, the Bush administration had sidestepped its requirements at all, Gonzalez claimed he couldn’t elaborate for reasons of national security.
Former NASA director General Michael Hayden, in charge when the NSA’s surveillance program was initiated in 2002, was slightly more forthcoming. FISA wasn’t applicable in certain cases, he told the senators, because the NSA’s surveillance relied on what he called a “subtly softer trigger” before full-scale eavesdropping began. Hayden, who is nowadays the nation’s second-highest ranking intelligence official, as deputy director of national intelligence, said he could answer further questions only in closed session.
Gonzalez’s testimony that the government is making increased use of FISA, together with his refusal to explain why it’s inapplicable in some cases — even though retroactive warrants can be issued — implies that the issue isn’t simply that government agents may sometimes want to act quickly. FISA rules demand that old-fashioned “probable cause” be shown before the FISA court issues warrants for electronic surveillance of a specific individual. Probable cause would be inapplicable if NSA were engaged in the automated analysis and data mining of telephone and e-mail communications in order to target possible terrorism suspects.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T reveals, NSA has access to the switches and records of most or all of the nation’s leading telecommunications companies. These companies’ resources are extensive: AT&T’s data center in Kansas, for instance, contains electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls over several decades. Moreover, the majority of international telecommunications nowadays no longer travel by satellite, but by undersea fiber-optic cables, so many carriers route international calls through their domestic U.S. switches.
With the telecom companies’ compliance, the NSA can today tap into those international communications far more easily than in the past, and in real time (or close to it). With access to much of the world’s telecom traffic, the NSA’s supercomputers can digitally vacuum up every call placed on a network and apply an arsenal of data-mining tools. Traffic analysis, together with social network theory, can reveal patterns indiscernible to human analysts, possibly suggesting terrorist activity. Content filtering, applying highly sophisticated search algorithms and powerful statistical methods like Bayesian analysis in tandem with machine learning, can search for particular words or language combinations that may indicate terrorist communications.
Whether the specific technologies developed under TIA and acquired by ARDA have actually been used in the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs — rather than only for intelligence gathering overseas — has not been proved. Still, descriptions of the two former TIA programs that became Topsail and Basketball mirror descriptions of ARDA and NSA technologies for analyzing vast streams of telephone and e-mail communications. Furthermore, one project manager active in the TIA program before it was terminated has gone on record to the effect that, while TIA was still funded, its researchers communicated regularly and maintained “good coordination” with their ARDA counterparts.
It’s this latter fact that is most to the point. Whether or not those specific TIA technologies were deployed for domestic U.S. surveillance, technologies very much like them were. In 2002, for instance, ARDA awarded $64 million in research contracts for a new program called Novel Intelligence from Massive Data. Furthermore, overall, a 2004 survey by the U.S. General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found federal agencies operating or developing 199 data mining projects, with more than 120 programs designed to collect and analyze large amounts of personal data on individuals to predict their behavior. Since the accounting office excluded most of the classified projects, the actual numbers would likely have been far higher.
Beyond these programs, additionally, there exist all the data-mining applications currently employed in the private sector for purposes like detecting credit card fraud or predicting health risks for insurance. All the information thus generated goes into databases that, given sufficient government motivation or merely the normal momentum of future history, may sooner or later be accessible to the authorities.
How should data-mining technologies like TIA be regulated in a democracy? It makes little sense to insist on rigid interpretations of FISA. This isn’t only because when the law was passed by Congress 30 years ago, terrorist threats on al Qaeda’s scale did not yet exist and technological developments hadn’t gone so far in potentially giving unprecedented destructive power to small groups and even individuals. Today’s changed technological context, additionally, invalidates FISA’s basic assumptions.
In an essay published next month in the New York University Review of Law and Security, titled “Whispering Wires and Warrantless Wiretaps: Data Mining and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance,” K. Taipale, executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, points out that in 1978, when FISA was drafted, it made sense to speak exclusively about intercepting a targeted communication, where there were usually two known ends and a dedicated communication channel that could be wiretapped.
With today’s networks, however, data and increasingly voice communications are broken into discrete packets. Intercepting such communications requires that filters be deployed at various communication nodes to scan all passing traffic with the hope of finding and extracting the packets of interest and reassembling them. Thus, even targeting a specific message from a known sender today generally requires scanning and filtering the entire communication flow in which it’s embedded. Given that situation, FISA is clearly inadequate because, Taipale argues, were it to be “applied strictly according to its terms prior to any ‘electronic surveillance’ of foreign communication flows passing through the U.S. or where there is a substantial likelihood of intercepting U.S. persons, then no automated monitoring of any kind could occur.”
Taipale proposes not that FISA should be discarded, but that it should be modified to allow for the electronic surveillance equivalent of a Terry stop — under U.S. law, the brief “stop and frisk” of a person by a law enforcement officer based on the legal standard of reasonable suspicion. In the context of automated data mining, it would mean that if suspicion turned out to be unjustified, after further monitoring, it would be discontinued. If, on the other hand, continued suspicion was reasonable, then it would continue, and at a certain point be escalated so that human agents would be called in to decide whether a suspicious individual’s identity should be determined and a FISA warrant issued.
To attempt to maintain FISA and the rest of our current laws about privacy without modifications to address today’s changed technological context, Taipale insists, amounts to a kind of absolutism that is ultimately self-defeating. For example, one of the technologies in the original TIA project, the Genisys Privacy Protection program, was intended to enable greater access to data for security reasons while simultaneously protecting individuals’ privacy by providing critical data to analysts via anonymized transaction data and by exposing identity only if evidence and appropriate authorization was obtained for further investigation. Ironically, Genisys was the one technology that definitely had its funding terminated and was not continued by another government agency after the public outcry over TIA.
ALSO:
The risks of TIA-like efforts.
Total Information Awareness Office
See also: Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX)
Government Information Awareness (For US, it’s dead but the archive is stall available)
US-EU Data Sharing Can’t Happen Without U.S. Legislation
US-EU Data Sharing Can’t Happen Without U.S. Legislation (7/1/2008)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: (202) 715-0818 or media@dcaclu.org
Statement of Barry Steinhardt
Director, ACLU Technology and Liberty Project
The negotiations underway between U.S. security agencies and their European counterparts over the transatlantic transfer of personal data are just the latest attempt to overcome a looming problem that has consistently interfered with the Bush Administration’s attempts to collect the personal information of an ever-increasing share of the world’s population.
That problem is the utter absence of real and enforceable privacy laws in the United States.
There is only so much that executive-branch officials – even officials of an administration more committed to privacy than the current one – can do to overcome this problem. The European Union, having enacted strong legislation to protect the privacy of its citizens, cannot be asked to render that legislation meaningless by allowing its citizens’ data to be shared with a country that is, in privacy terms, all but lawless.
While there are undoubtedly security bureaucrats in Europe who are hungering to betray their own laws and strike a deal, bureaucratic action and unenforceable administrative assurances cannot make up for the lack of good U.S. privacy laws. The United States should not be pressuring the Europeans into weakening their privacy laws; we should be strengthening ours.
We have carefully examined the report referenced in recent news reports, and it is clear that the negotiations are not nearly as far along as has been reported. As the report makes plain, it is not easy to bridge the gap in privacy protection between the United States and Europe. U.S. officials try to talk a good game in this document about “a networked and layered set of authorities” for protecting privacy here, but their effort is a laughable stretch. The report makes clear that, like the ugly stepsister trying to force her foot into Cinderella’s shoe, this project is destined to fail. And there’s no fairy godmother in sight – we just need good U.S. privacy laws.
Whatever limited agreements are reached through this negotiation must be completely open and thoroughly vetted by the public in both the United States and Europe, including by the Congress, European Parliament and the new U.S. presidential administration.
What’s Wrong With Fusion Centers – Executive Summary
What’s Wrong With Fusion Centers?
> Report (pdf)
> Executive Summary
> Map <!–
> Fusion Video –>
> Privacy and Technology
From ACLU:
A new institution is emerging in American life: Fusion Centers. These state, local and regional institutions were originally created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. Though they developed independently and remain quite different from one another, for many the scope of their mission has quickly expanded—with the support and encouragement of the federal government—to cover “all crimes and all hazards.” The types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector.
These new fusion centers, over 40 of which have been established around the country, raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the “war on terrorism” are combining to threaten Americans’ privacy at an unprecedented level.
Moreover, there are serious questions about whether data fusion is an effective means of preventing terrorism in the first place, and whether funding the development of these centers is a wise investment of finite public safety resources. Yet federal, state and local governments are increasing their investment in fusion centers without properly assessing whether they serve a necessary purpose.
There’s nothing wrong with the government seeking to do a better job of properly sharing legitimately acquired information about law enforcement investigations—indeed, that is one of the things that 9/11 tragically showed is very much needed.
But in a democracy, the collection and sharing of intelligence information—especially information about American citizens and other residents—need to be carried out with the utmost care. That is because more and more, the amount of information available on each one of us is enough to assemble a very detailed portrait of our lives. And because security agencies are moving toward using such portraits to profile how “suspicious” we look.1
New institutions like fusion centers must be planned in a public, open manner, and their implications for privacy and other key values carefully thought out and debated. And like any powerful institution in a democracy, they must be constructed in a carefully bounded and limited manner with sufficient checks and balances to prevent abuse.
Unfortunately, the new fusion centers have not conformed to these vital requirements.
Since no two fusion centers are alike, it is difficult to make generalized statements about them. Clearly not all fusion centers are engaging in improper intelligence activities and not all fusion center operations raise civil liberties or privacy concerns. But some do, and the lack of a proper legal framework to regulate their activities is troublesome. This report is intended to serve as a primer that explains what fusion centers are, and how and why they were created. It details potential problems fusion centers present to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans, including:
- Ambiguous Lines of Authority. The participation of agencies from multiple jurisdictions in fusion centers allows the authorities to manipulate differences in federal, state and local laws to maximize information collection while evading accountability and oversight through the practice of “policy shopping.”
- Private Sector Participation. Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the intelligence process, breaking down the arm’s length relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of these companies, and increasing the risk of a data breach.
- Military Participation. Fusion centers are involving military personnel in law enforcement activities in troubling ways.
- Data Fusion = Data Mining. Federal fusion center guidelines encourage whole sale data collection and manipulation processes that threaten privacy.
- Excessive Secrecy. Fusion centers are hobbled by excessive secrecy, which limits public oversight, impairs their ability to acquire essential information and impedes their ability to fulfill their stated mission, bringing their ultimate value into doubt.
The lack of proper legal limits on the new fusion centers not only threatens to undermine fundamental American values, but also threatens to turn them into wasteful and misdirected bureaucracies that, like our federal security agencies before 9/11, won’t succeed in their ultimate mission of stopping terrorism and other crime.
The information in this report provides a starting point from which individuals can begin to ask informed questions about the nature and scope of intelligence programs being conducted in their communities. The report concludes with a list of recommendations for Congress and state legislatures.
1 Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt, EVEN BIGGER, EVEN WEAKER: THE EMERGING SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY: WHERE ARE WE NOW? AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION, (Sept. 2007), available at http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/privacy/bigger_weaker. pdf.
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