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Government Spying Goes Global
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Twan
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Dec 12, 2006 14:58 PST
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Government Spying Goes Global
By Maureen Webb, AlterNet. Posted December 12, 2006.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/45285/
The government is tracking your transactions to help find terror
suspects -- a move that makes about as much sense as assigning guilt
based on Google keyword searches.
The story which broke last week about a traveler risk scoring system
called the Automated Targeting System, or "ATS," evokes an image of an
Orwellian world in which the State compiles a secret dossier on every
individual and sorts the population according to secret criteria,
assigning each person a "risk score." The individual has no recourse to
challenge his risk rating, and he has no way of correcting any false or
incomplete information about him. In fact, he will never know what
information is being used against him, or even the criteria on which he
has been judged a risk to the State. It is a disturbing image, and the
fact that the government has been conducting the ATS program in secret
for four years has shocked many people. However, the ATS is hardly a
surprise to those who have been keeping track of similar programs.
First, there was Total Information Awareness, or "TIA," a program that
was to data mine "the transaction space" in order to single out people
who might be terrorists. Then there was the Multi-state Anti-terrorism
Information Exchange, or "MATRIX," which linked together state and
commercial information and was probably a data-mining program. In a test
run of their technology for government officials, its developers boasted
that they had found 120,000 likely terrorists living in the United
States. In the area of travel, the second-generation Computer Assisted
Passenger Prescreening System, or "CAPPS II," was to data mine airline
and commercial information in order to score travelers as red, green or
amber risks. Its successor program, "Secure Flight," tried to do a
similar thing. Then, in the area of telecommunications, there was the
NSA program, secretly authorized by the President to data mine the
telephone calls and emails of the American people.
All of these programs, except for the NSA's, were ostensibly scrapped by
the government or Congress. Americans thought TIA was just too creepy,
states opted out of MATRIX in droves because it was so intrusive, the
GAO said that CAPPS II was ineffective in identifying possible
terrorists, and Secure Flight was killed after it was caught risk
scoring, which Congress had expressly forbidden it to do. Each program
never really went away. Instead, they were simply repackaged -- or
carried on in secret, like the ATS program.
Data mining is the use of computer algorithms to search masses of
information for specified criteria. Risk scoring is a statistical rating
on how closely an individual matches the criteria. The government is
using these two techniques to sort through the masses of information it
has been gathering and buying from private data aggregating companies
since 9-11, in order to watch every transaction made by the American
population, and populations outside the United States, all of the time.
This is mass surveillance, and it's global in scope. Domestic systems
feed into global ones and global systems -- like biometric passports,
the sharing of airline reservation system information, the interception
of international banking records, and the interception of global
communications, to name a few -- feed into the domestic.
The purpose of data mining is not to check individuals' personal
information against information about known terrorists, or those
suspected of terrorism on "reasonable grounds" as they cross borders,
send emails or access public services. The purpose of it is to predict
who might be a terrorist -- a little like the film "Minority Report," in
which officials stop criminal acts before they happen by reading
people's minds. However, the technology that is being used today falls
far short of the technology of Hollywood fantasy.
First, the information on which data mining or risk scoring depend is
often inaccurate, lacking context, dated, or incomplete. And like the
ATS program, data mining and risk scoring programs never contain a
mechanism by which individuals can correct, contextualize or object to
the information that is being used against them, or even know what it
is. Operating on a "preemption" principle, these systems are
uninterested in this kind of precision. They would be bogged down if
they were held to the ordinary standards of access, accuracy, and
accountability. Secondly, the criteria used to sort masses of data will
always be over-inclusive and mechanical. Data mining is like assessing
guilt by "Google" key-word searches. And since these systems use broad
markers for predicting terrorism, ethnic and religious profiling are
endemic to them.
Welcome to the national insecurity state, where our virtual identities
are continually assessed for the risk we pose to the state and the
normal relationship between the individual and the state in democratic
societies is turned on its head. Now, the individual answers to the
state and woe betide the person who is branded with a high "risk score."
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