From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Sep 03 2002 - 07:56:41 MDT
Now this is interesting (at least for me).
Here is an article on Uncloaking Terrorist Networks
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_4/krebs/
Slashdot commentary is here (but it doesn't seem very robust so far):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=39193&threshold=-1&commentsort=3&tid=172&mode=thread&pid=0
Now, what is of interest is in the different nature of a
terrorist network vs. a normal social network. To remain
covert you have to play by the "we are a covert network" rules.
(Of course this could be defeated, e.g. CIA agents living
"normal lives" in our midst.)
So this leads to an interesting "quasi-transparent" society
concept. You divide life into "private" and "public" realms.
Private being on your own property (or in a residence) or
a workplace and "public" being everything in effect "owned"
by a "government" entity, e.g. streets, airways, etc.
Now, within the public sphere (for the public good) the
government has the ability to track everything one does.
So the government can monitor who delivers your mail,
what stores you go to, who visits you, etc. Obviously
this produces a lot of data. But people generally have
pretty fixed routines so you can discard much of it.
Since one has to fly in the "public" airspace, one
could do queries like "identify people who attend
mosques who visit cities they have never visited
before at the same time who are (on visas|immigrants|
related-to-immigrants|felons)". [Obviously the last is
attempting to identify people who are not "trusted"
members of a free society.]
Yes, I know its profiling to some extent. But it
isn't "lets stop every Cadillac driven by a black
man with 3 well dressed women in it".
Once one knows the characteristics of a covert network
and discovers a suspicious "cell", a small amount of work
should uncover the rest of the netork by looking for
links between it and other suspicious cells -- or
perhaps even any connections period (though here
one has to be careful).
How much freedom does one *really* have to give up?
My freedom to travel isn't hindered in any way.
Sure, apartment owners would have to report who is
living in an apartment, but if I live in a house
government records show who lives there anyway.
(Voter records, tax records & SS payments would
show who lives there as well).
Now, should you allow the goverment to have access to
your CC records? Or access to all store purchase
records? [i.e. "flag all apartment dwellers who
are purchasing large quantities of fertilizer].
Can we split the hairs fine enough -- I don't think
WMD can be made from video tapes so those records
should remain private -- but what about purchases
at Home Depot? If it would help make the "public
environment" safer, I think there is a lot of
information that people in Western democracies
would be happy to have monitored to combat
terrorism and violence.
Thoughts?
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:39 MST