
UK spies using social media data for mass surveillance - infodroid
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/17/uk-spies-using-social-media-data-for-mass-surveillance/
======
infodroid
The headline unfortunately downplays the scope of the data, since it covers a
lot more than social media - it can include legally priviliged and "otherwise
confidential" information, as well as information on "religion, racial or
ethnic origin, political views, medical condition, sexual orientation."

What is remarkable is the absolute lack of oversight over the sharing of this
sensitive data with foreign governments and law enforcement, but especially
with so-called "industry partners". And that there don't appear to be any
legal penalties for its misuse.

~~~
QAPereo
What’s more remarkable to me is that people happily offer up this data on
themselves, and what worries me is what intelligence agencies do to spy on
people who care enough not to broadcast their every movement, meal, and stray
thought.

~~~
alchemism
What’s more remarkable to me is how people don’t see how easy it is to set up
a clean surface identity and discrete secondary identities, and hide in plain
sight.

~~~
indubitable
This is not as effective as you might think.

We reveal so much more about ourselves than we could ever imagine. If you use,
or used Reddit, Snoopsnoo [1] is a site that uses incredibly primitive
language parsing to build a profile on users based on what they've voluntarily
submitted. And again I have to emphasize that is using very primitive parsing.
It's disconcerting how much we reveal when an algorithm is able to rapidly and
effectively piece it together.

Now when enter the government that data can be cross matched against other
meta-data to nail down your identity to a very small segment, if not outright
match it. And then we get into things like language analysis. I make some
token effort to anonymity, but my wife has mentioned she often knows its me
posting before seeing the username. And I can do the same for other people I
know well. No idea what we're picking up on, but it's a task that machine
learning would be phenomenally well suited to do - and do better than we do.
And then there are things like more explicit dialect issues. This [2] is a
quiz based on American dialects. Again it is phenomenal how much your
vocabulary, which undoubtedly you view as 'proper', actually reveals your
location. Our very language is not only a finger print but also a geo-tracker.

[1] - [https://www.snoopsnoo.com/](https://www.snoopsnoo.com/) [2] -
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-
review/...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-
review/dialect-quiz-map.html)

~~~
Jill_the_Pill
That snoopsnoo is fascinating. I don't use reddit, so I couldn't look up
myself, but viewing the random profiles was so interesting. You could get a
real sense of the people -- a college student with an eating disorder who
likes a lot of makeup products, an athletic married woman who works lifting
heavy things in a warehouse and makes quilts, a sweet loner guy with a deep
attachment to France. It would be a treasure trove for a fiction writer in
need of characters.

------
DyslexicAtheist
Quick, spread some FUD[0] to justify our conduct and nanny-state:

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/17/uk-most-
seve...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/17/uk-most-severe-
terror-threat-ever-mi5-islamist)

Seriously the timing of these 2 stories is very questionable.

------
peterburkimsher
The police in Australia have been sharing private information about members of
community groups with private companies to "manage" future activities and
potential "security threats".

Since 2009. That's before the Snowden leaks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Desalination_Plant#S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Desalination_Plant#Sharing_of_private_information_with_private_consortia)

One might assume that the information about members of these groups was
gleaned from social media sites. I feel like this is an example of "guilty
until proven innocent".

------
jarym
How is the government storing legally privileged information at all lawful?
And Amber Rudd wonders why respectable technologists sneer at her - maybe it's
because they've read 1984 and want to do what they can to stop the madness!

~~~
turblety
One thing we're learning is that the UK government can do whatever it wants.
Who is going to stop it breaking it's own laws? The UK people have been
educated in an obedience system (where they actually all wear a uniform) and
are taught to do what they're told without challenge. The result is a large
population of people who can not think for themselves and believe that the
government is like a big parent who can keep them nice and safe.

For years the UK at least had the EU who has some laws protecting people, but
they've even convinced these obedient lemmings to leave the only union
protecting their rights.

One of the biggest problems with government and law is that the people will
only fight for what they want, not what they already have. Meaning history
will always repeat itself, laws will be passed when people become repressed,
then repealed as soon as people forget.

~~~
switch007
> One thing we're learning is that the UK government can do whatever it wants

This shouldn't be news for anyone who's lived here a few years, with a basic
understanding of UK politics. The acrid stench of arrogance and righteousness
that emanates from Westminster travels to the far corners of these isles.

~~~
pjc50
Vindictiveness, enabled by the newspapers, is a big part of this as well. A
large chunk of the public don't want rights for _everyone_ ; they would
actually prefer a system where the police beat confessions out of suspects and
people are fitted up for crimes because they're a minority who happened to be
near it.

------
driverdan
Original source:
[https://privacyinternational.org/node/1532](https://privacyinternational.org/node/1532)

------
LeoPanthera
I feel like... I'm actually OK with this?

Social media is public. It's _intentionally_ public. That's really the whole
point. It's your choice to post things to Facebook or Twitter or Snapstergram.

Of all the privacy issues that we should be worried about it feels like this
should not be one of them. If you don't want your social media info used...
don't post it to social media!

~~~
papaf
_It 's intentionally public._

Is it? I was under the impression that I was sharing information with my
"friends".

------
zigzag333
You will never understand what is happening around you if you don't find the
courage to escape your own self-censorship, self-reinforced prison-of-a-
worldview. You are all able to think critically, but for reasons I won't go
into, fail to use the same critical thinking for a huge part of the
information you come across.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aOhnK01wMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aOhnK01wMY)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHi-1PJsgbI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHi-1PJsgbI)

Disclaimer: I do not know nor trust those people. I personally found them
more-or-less by accident and do think that noone in this day-and-age would be
able to make any tours if a) there was no "guarding angel" protecting them b)
were not part of the game

peace and prosper ;)

------
anigbrowl
Without endorsing this practice, as a practical matter they'd be idiots not
to.

~~~
jstanley
Sure, if their goal is to collect as much data as possible, rather than to do
good in the world.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's a silly objection. The 'good' they're attempting to do is preventing
terrorism by sifting through the sea of available information on social media.
When terrorism occurs in developed countries, the public's anger and fear
leads to questions like 'why didn't you see this coming?' And so politicians
naturally enough say they'll watch more closely for the signs of such
activity.

Again, I am not endorsing this, but espionage and counter-espionage has the
same arms-race characteristics as other spheres of military and indeed much
commercial activity. What's your alternative proposal? I don't have a good one
myself. Also, what do you think will happen to a politician that says 'this
sort of thing can't be prevented,' given the fact that many pundits and media
outlets are happy to promote the notion of a security state to the general
public, and the general public is poorly equipped to evaluate their claims?

I'm absolutely not trying to dismiss your argument, but I wish you'd put more
effort into fleshing it out. We have centuries of experience for the
proposition that the public is easily stampeded into fortress-building and
suspicion, and overcoming that requires more than a generalized wish people to
just Do The Right Thing, as if that were easily identifiable.

~~~
e12e
> That's a silly objection. The 'good' they're attempting to do is preventing
> terrorism by sifting through the sea of available information on social
> media.

They are trying to prevent terrorism. And they are sifting through lots of
data.

They are also doing a lot of other things. I certainly hope terrorism isn't
their main concern. Maybe some of that data is helpful preventing the odd hate
crime. But it might just also be used for union busting or something like it
in the name of stability and law and order.

Total surveillance is useful to control a population - but I don't think it's
particularly useful as a counter terrorism tool.

~~~
anigbrowl
To be honest I don't think they have that many other ideas. Infiltration and
in-person spying is really quite hard to do against affinity groups and is
also ethically problematic (eg sting operations and so on). There's a great
deal of political pressure, compounded by the 24 hour news cycle and nowadays
by social media. A politician that says 'look people, we made some bad
foreign-policy choices and we're just going to have to put up with a bit more
of this terrorism until they feel better about us' might as well start writing
their memoirs because their career in politics will be over the minute they
say that in public.

In a way, I think the traditional mode of representative government is part of
the problem. It simply doesn't reward anyone to level with the public like
that. I'd like to be shown wrong, can anyone provide a counterexample of a
politician serving in office who persuaded the public to just accept it? The
only sort-of example I can think of is US politicians who throw up their hands
over teh gun control issue after a massacre and say they can't really do
anything and then wait for the issue to fall off the front page. But that's
also why so many people are disgusted by politics.

If you want politicians to stop engaging in security theater and the like, it
looks like you're going to have to buy them off. With enough money a
politician will apparently say anything. Doesn't sound too sustainable to me
though.

------
jheriko
"UK spies do job properly"

not-news.

------
hacker_9
So what if they collect it and share it with foreign governments? Social media
is public to begin with, so big deal if they are basically indexing the
information. Doesn't stop them moaning it's not enough or preventing bomb
attacks.

~~~
jstanley
> or preventing bomb attacks

You're more likely to die by falling down the stairs than by being killed by a
terrorist[0]. Bomb attacks are not something you should be concerned by.

However much bomb attacks scare you, you should be ~100x more scared of living
in a house that has more than one floor.

[0] [http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/12/just-dangerous-
terror...](http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/12/just-dangerous-terrorism-
really.html)

~~~
alva
This argument is repeated ad nauseam and a bit of thinking on distribution and
magnitude of risk will show you why it is nonsense in this context.

~~~
jstanley
Enlighten us?

~~~
alva
Risks of day-to-day activities are known, their distribution effectively fixed
and the magnitude of the risk also understood. The probability of ladder falls
tripling year-to-year is of order 10^-14. I understand that driving my car
could potential result in my death. There is some variability in the risk
depending on how careful I am, time of day, whether I am sober etc, and of
course risk out of my hands from other road users. I can have a good
understanding of the risk and factor that in whether to carry out a daily
activity.

War and Terrorism is completely different. When they occur is unknown, whether
the event is small or cataclysmic unknown, the secondary effects they have in
a wide complex system unknown.

You can take the original argument even further to understand why it is silly.
Atomic bombs have only been used against people twice, therefore the chance of
you dying in a car crash are multi-million times higher than dying from an
atomic bomb. Should there not be an intense focus on de-proliferation, de-
escalation of conflicts because of this? The consequences of an nuclear attack
are so great, we spend huge amount of resources to reduce the likelihood.

Terrorism is similar. It is not only the poor victims of the attack who
suffer. Our societies function on a fairly fine balance, much of which is
predicated on the ability of our governance to keep us safe. Rapidly
increasing frequency of attacks and their effectiveness drive us closer to
instability and can severely damage our economies.

You dying in a car crash is going to hurt your friends and loved ones. You
being blown up along with 50 passengers on the underground, the fifth
explosion that week can have dramatic and scary results for us all.

~~~
jstanley
> Should there not be an intense focus on de-proliferation, de-escalation of
> conflicts because of this?

Sure, nuclear disarmament wouldn't hurt, but like you said: atomic bombs have
only been used against people twice. There's no evidence that their use
against people is likely to substantially increase over the next few years, so
it's not something that is worth worrying about. Just like terrorism.

EDIT: And _certainly_ it is not worth using the risk of atomic bombs as an
excuse to invade the privacy and erode the freedoms of millions of people.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Do you think I'm correct in believing terrorism _is_ likely to increase over
the next few years?

~~~
jstanley
No? Do you believe that?

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Some sources claim the number of people who have died from terrorist activity
has increased ninefold since the year 2000[1].

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-17/global-terrorism-
index...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-17/global-terrorism-index-
increase/6947200)

