
Giving the F.B.I. What It Wants - donohoe
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/giving-the-fbi-what-it-wants.html?src=twr&pagewanted=all
======
lisper
> if 300 million people started sending private information to federal agents,
> the government would need to hire as many as another 300 million people,
> possibly more, to keep up with the information and we’d have to redesign our
> entire intelligence system

This man is hopelessly naive about modern computer technology. Keeping track
of 300 million people is not quite trivial (yet) but well within the means of
the FBI at its current staffing and funding levels. Worse -- much worse -- is
that data mining is _virtually certain_ to result in very convincing looking
false positives.

This is why it is unwise to take legal advice from performance artists.

~~~
antics
WHOOOOOAAAAAA, that is definitely wrong. The FBI is definitely not actively
monitoring 300 million people, and is certainly not going to start anywhere
near soon. In fact, it is not even close to being ready to take that on, and
certainly not either at the current level of funding or staffing. What you've
said is categorically incorrect in every sense of the word. Once again, I
cannot emphasize enough that what was said here is wrong.

But, on the positive side, you are totally right that he is completely naive
about data mining technology.

~~~
antics
Adding to the above, when we talk about monitoring people, most people have in
mind a model that requires O(log n) monitors; monitoring 300 people is like
keeping 300 bookmarks in a book, as it takes only a few people to monitor
those 300 bookmarks. To the government, the model is O(n). They're not
maintaining 300 bookmarks, they're reading 300 pages simultaneously.

The reason is that people are the asymptotic bottleneck. If computers totally
and automatically understood everything, then the dominating term would be
compute time. But it's not. The dominating term is _clearly_ people, who must
ultimately review the truly promising information. Maybe the compute resources
make this linear relationship hold over lower constants, but it is still
definitely linear. And any technological advantage is unfortunately
shortchanged by the constant factor of red tape.

Ex-Googlers like Ron here no doubt have a different view on what can/should be
done to monitor people, but I argue that this is irrelevant to the government.
And even if they agreed with them in principle, there's enough red tape that a
system like what they have in mind would just never be realistic.

~~~
burgerbrain
In these sorts of situations, it is almost always prudent to overestimate your
enemies capabilities.

If you're going to be surprised, it's best for it to be _pleasant_.

------
ck2
This is going to backfire, bigtime.

The way it works is you will never be cleared, the security-theater machine
has "eaten" you.

You can only give them more reasons to collect evidence on petty crimes, their
original motivation for stalking you, even if your file was flagged
accidentally, is long lost.

With half a million names on the "Terrorist Watch List", once they have ways
to automate this (ala nationwide facial recognition and domestic drones) you
will be stalked for the rest of your life by the government. You'll be 80
years old and they will have terabytes on you for absolutely no reason. But if
you even accidentally commit a petty crime, they will happily share the info
with local cops to hassle you more.

~~~
hooande
I don't see how this will backfire. He seems to live a right life. No one in
the government cares about whatever petty crimes he may commit.

Federal law enforcement only cares about petty crimes when they can lead to
stopping major crimes. If they think you have information they want, they'll
hold the maximum penalty for anything you do over your head until they get it.
But they have no reason to harass someone who isn't involved in major criminal
or subversive activity.

Being on a watch list sucks and it's going to cause this guy inconvenience for
life, for whatever he does. But federal agents tend to be intelligent and
driven people. They aren't any more likely to waste time harassing a stranger
than you are.

~~~
quanticle
That only works as long as he's not opposing the state or any corporation or
individual with powerful state connections. I dare this guy to go down to the
local Occupy Wall Street protests and then see how little the government
cares.

The fact is, we violate laws every day. In addition to actual violations, we
do many more things that look suspicious and can be construed as potential
violations. The government doesn't have to convict you in order to radically
lower your quality of life. It merely has to investigate you.

For example, I knew a person that protested against the RNC convention in
2008. Though they were protesting peacefully, their group was broken up and
arrested by the FBI. For the next two years, their case was bounced down from
federal court to state courts, and then from state courts to county courts.
Two and a half years later, the case was dismissed without any explanation or
apology. However, while the case was ongoing, this person was unable to get a
job, unable to get housing, unable to do anything that would require a
background check or a credit check.

Was this person involved in major criminal or subversive activity? I don't see
how she could have been, given that all charges were dropped. However, the
actions taken against her can only be described as harassment.

------
ajg1977
_It was clear who had the power in this situation. And when you’re face to
face with someone with so much power, you behave in an unusual manner. You
dare not take any action._

Sadly that's far from unusual. Meek compliance is how most people (myself
included) tend to behave when confronted by federal or state agencies,
regardless of how their privacy is being invaded.

If more people raised a stink, the number of US citizens subjected to such a
thing would rapidly drop. People would not be dragged from airplanes or into
questioning at the slightest hint of suspicion from highly questionable
sources. You want to see what's in my storage unit? No problem, go get a
warrant. As an aside - if the author was mistaken about its contents they just
lied to a federal agent which itself is a crime, regardless of any original
innocence).

------
epoxyhockey
This is a great example of how our government is making new enemies everyday
by investigating _everyone_. They took a happy-go-lucky college student and
turned him into an activist against government surveillance. I wish government
employees would think more about the consequences of their actions against
common people, but I fear that they are too preoccupied with their Hollywood-
cop fantasies.

~~~
rdtsc
> how our government is making new enemies everyday by investigating everyone.

The sad thing is, as a system and individually they probably think they are
helping a great deal. They are investigating and taking things seriously, they
are protecting our country against pervasive and extremely dangerous
terrorists. I bet most of them have brainwashed (and that includes
brainwashing themselves) into thinking that.

They are making enemies but they don't see that, to them enemies just appear,
spawned out of pure 'hatred of our freedoms'. The more they see this kind of
antagonism, the harder they investigate everyone, the most they investigate,
the more antagonism they generate.

~~~
suivix
Sorry but I lost you when you called them 'brainwashed'. That is incorrect and
also derogatory.

~~~
burgerbrain
Why do you say it is incorrect? And I don't think a statement of apparent fact
can be called "derogatory". If there is a less offensive term for the meaning,
I'm not aware of it.

~~~
westicle
Derogatory simply means critical, or a statement which detracts from the
standing of something. A statement of apparent fact can easily be derogatory.

Women are on average physically weaker than men.

African-americans are on average of lower intelligence than asian-americans.

------
cduan
Here's what I would like to know: has this lack of privacy resulted in the
author not doing something he would have liked to do otherwise? Because the
real problem with privacy invasion is not the information that is collected
(which more often than not is mundane, like the author's), but rather the
chilling effects on activities that, though legitimate, would raise suspicion,
embarrassment, or other concern.

------
DanBC
I'm pretty sure that what he thinks is a big, unwieldy, dataset is trivial for
the TLAs to data-mine. (How big is his data? I'm about to web-search for it).
He provides photographs, but has he stripped the meta data?

I note that he's an artist, not a computer scientist, and that he may be
blissfully unaware of the amount of computing and programming power available
to government.

He does have a good point when he mentions that monitoring good guys means
more false positives and more missed opportunities to monitor bad guys.

And he does make a good point in the last few paragraphs; privacy advocates
are horrified by some of the things happening at Google / Facebook / Twitter /
etc; but these services are very very popular. Why do people give up these
freedoms so willingly?

~~~
Osiris
_Why do people give up these freedoms so willingly?_

I don't think it's accurate to word it that way. Allowing some information
about oneself to become public is more an issue of personal privacy than about
freedom.

Now, if the government decides to use that now public information to detain or
otherwise strip the freedom from that individual, that's another far more
frightful issue.

I think that most people tend to post updates on Facebook/Twitter because they
don't consider it private. Everyone I know knows that I'm married and to whom,
so I don't worry about posting that on Facebook. People are often worried
about online privacy, but I would bet that most people are pretty open with
friends and family in in-person situations.

Now if a site like Facebook is taking data that I intend to keep private and
turning that into public data, that's also a different, and far more
important, issue.

------
pvg
He seems to have come up with an interesting form of protest - civil over-
obedience.

~~~
gwern
Similar: <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Work-to-rule>

------
sliverstorm
This could make for a great front. Someone with such a meticulous personality
could probably produce, for example, a well-documented "business trip" that is
a complete lie, while engaging in something completely different behind the
scenes. If designed right it would be nearly impossible to detect.

Or maybe I've just watched too many spy movies.

~~~
buu700
This was my exact thought too. In fact, I would go out of my way to fabricate
a tiny but measurable percentage of the data, just to see what I could
convincingly fake and to give me plausible deniability for any of the real
stuff, just in case. In the event that I ever found it necessary to do
something shady for whatever reason, I'd have a lot of practice masking it.

...Or maybe I've also just watched too many spy movies.

~~~
chc
How would you know how much of the fiction was "convincingly fake" and how
much was "blatantly fake" until they decided to come after you?

------
mmaunder
I know that stark interrogation room and the L shaped desk and camera well.
The waiting room he describes is called secondary processing and it's a very
unhappy place, mostly folks of foreign nationality about to be deported back
to their home country. I met a brazilian guy there once who was almost crying
and offered him some gum, trying to offer encouragement, condolences,
whatever.

------
forgottenpaswrd
I think he is being extremely naive here giving them all of his data.

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I
will find something in them which will hang him” Cardinal Richelieu

The valuable data here is the personal data of the FBI interrogators , yeah we
have nothing to hide but you (government, or power structures) have not
either.

In real life you don't give your private information to stalkers that don't
want to give theirs.

------
rbanffy
> but if 300 million people started sending private information to federal
> agents

I hope he understands he is advocating a DDoS attack on FBI's information
collection departments ;-)

I hope this insanity ends someday, but it's not really a very rational
expectation. Once paranoia sets in, it's hard to cure. It's costing us
(mankind - I am neither a US citizen nor live in the US) resources that could
be better employed. I am sure the FBI folks would prefer to spend their time
investigating actual crimes instead of shadows. But, again, once you start
believing every shadow is your enemy, it's very hard to act rationally.

Instilling fear is the goal of the terrorists they try to fight. As far as I
can see, they won. Long ago.

:-(

~~~
Ziomislaw
I doubt that they'd prefer to investigate actual crimes.

People are paid for doing work. The fact that they did work is measured i.e.
by the number of cases 'solved'. Would you rather get paid more ('solve' many
cases) or less (go for difficult do solve actual cases)? People have to
sustain their families etc.

A friend of mine summed it up pretty good. " 'Police' don't catch people they
should catch, they catch those they _can_ catch."

------
yaix
I live in China for some years now. This sounds just like stuff that would
happen over here. I have met so many Americans that, after having been here
for more than just a few month, have realized just how similar China and the
USA have become. Kind of scary.

The author was lucky not having had ties with the wrong political party or
some other US opposition group.

------
llambda
> When I first started talking about my project in 2003, people thought I was
> insane. Why would anyone tell everyone what he was doing at all times? Why
> would anyone want to share a photo of every place he visited? Now eight
> years later, more than 800 million people do the same thing I’ve been doing
> each time they update their status or post an image or poke someone on
> Facebook.

The author makes an important point earlier in the article and here
contradicts himself: he says that he intentionally presents the information in
a disorganized way. This is a problem that Facebook and social networks in
general solve. So don't think that because everyone has a Facebook and is
therefore flooding the market with information about them it's no longer
useful to intelligence gatherers be them governmental or private interests.
That's actually the problem of a platform like Facebook where privacy is
concerned.

------
Freestyler_3
Giving up privacy? I hope you were only advising on public privacy, which I
myself rather not give up. I understand where you are coming from, people can
observe you to get all that information but when they are doing that you
barely have privacy, by controlling the information they get by sending it to
them yourself you control the border of private and public yourself.

-you can manipulate the stream of information and send false information, they will still check it and they will always do if they think it is necessary, you will never be trusted by them not even if all things you sent them are true.

-It is quite a hassle to keep all this information and to send it out. It would be easier to just let them investigate it themselves.

------
thewisedude
Informing FBI whatever you do every time is such a pain. Dont you think it
makes living less fun?

Also, in the future we could have sophisticated computer systems that could
analyze data if everybody started revealing everything. His solution of
revealing everything may not necessarily be a long term solution.

------
quellhorst
I think this guy should have just kept quiet. There is something called the
right to remain silent. The more you talk the more they want.

~~~
rhizome
You have a right to remain silent with the FBI, but they can use your silence
against you.

------
ZipCordManiac
Wow, it's really sad to see somebody so completely broken and brainwashed that
he'll literally report his every move to authorities. If the government was
monitoring his home with an iMac this would be right out of 1984.

~~~
sliverstorm
Did you just completely miss the point of the article?

~~~
rafedb
lol i think he did

------
bbg
Sounds like someone always wanted a big brother.

------
joska
Maybee he should recommend this system to some of his coreligionist in his
native country Lebanon. That would realy help the CIA and prevent innocent
people being killed.

~~~
sygma
He is not from Lebanon. His Wikipedia page [0] identifies his native country
as Bangladesh.

[0]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasan_M._Elahi>

