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[flagged] Homeland Security using “Babel X” to link SSNs to social media posts
77 points by danghatesme on Sept 10, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 37 comments
Recently I learned about this effort by Homeland Security, Border Patrol, and other government agencies to track the online discussions of citizens & immigrants, and tie those discussions to their SSNs.

I suppose LifeLog (Facebook) was merely a stepping stone in this effort, which appears to be accelerating with the advent of low-cost AI.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bge3/dhs-uses-ai-tool-babel-x-babel-street-social-media-citizens-refugees




Just FYI: if you have a URL to post, just post it, without commentary in your submission. If you have something to say about the article you're submitting, you can write a normal comment after posting it.


Why does the comment field exist if not to write a comment? Why do you care where someone writes their comment? Personally I find it weird to write a separate comment as though I were not the one who posted the thing I'm commenting on.

"Just FYI" If we are telling each other what to do and what we don't like, then I would say I don't like or agree with this attempt to tell someone else what to do over something so trivial and without some significant excuse or necessity.


Yeah, I don't like it either. The original commentary should stay with the headline, not risk getting ignored or downvoted into oblivion.


At the bottom of pretty much every page here on HN is a link to the FAQ, here is the entry regarding this kind of thing:

> How do I make a link in a text submission?

> You can't. This is to prevent people from submitting a link with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.


Yeah, I get that, but my opinion is different from the policy is what I'm saying.


That's your opinion, that's fine. But the existing FAQ entry is consistent with the "don't editorialize titles" policy, too. No one gets a privileged position not even the submitter. The closest a submitter can get to a privileged position in the comments is by submitting their own content, like a blog discussing this issue and citing the Vice article and then their "comment" becomes their own article.


>>>>>> Why does the comment field exist if not to write a comment?

Maybe the design of the site should reflect the policy, instead of ambiguity that results in polluting the entire first page with meta-commentary about HN policy instead of the actual post.


>>>>>>> Why does the comment field exist if not to write a comment?

There is no comment field in submissions. Click submit and see what the three fields are, none of them are "comment".

The site's design and behavior reflects the policy.


Then what are we even talking about? Is the field explicitly labeled some other way that means "this is not for your commentary"? I actually didn't assume it necessarily had a label that said literally "Comment:".

I posted something just the other day myself and don't remember how the field was lebeled, but I sure wrote a comment in it, because it was just the obvious thing to do. (and the comment appeared in the form of a regular comment as though I had just added a comment like anyone else, not with the url.)

So I don't know how people actually even write those posts with text and a url, since when I tried, it didn't do that, but, I also cannot begin to guess why anyone has a problem with it. Why in the world is it wrong to say why you posted something, what aspect of it you found noteworthy, as you post it?


I imagine for most new news, multiple people submit the link. They can't all be offered a comment at the top and people writing in a rush due to wanting to be first doesn't seem like a great idea.


Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37458650


HN has perhaps the best community on the internet but they’re competing with craigslist for greatest arrogance in site design. There are some QoL changes for which there are no excuses not to have been implemented by now. For one, I have no idea what the fat-fingered do when trying to upvote/downvote.


I don't know if it's arrogance as much as complacency and every change to the website requiring someone to work with an outdated Lisp dialect and the gross JavaScript/HTML tricks the frontend uses.


In this case it's a design decision, to priorice the discussion of the community over the opinion of the OP. If you watch carefully, small features are added regularly without announcement.


There is an “unvote” button


Document: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23815146-cbp-pta-bab...

Recommend reading both the document and the Vice piece. Pretty damning considering the data being collected (mobile location data from ad networks via mobile apps).


When I was filling out an ESTA application recently, needed in order for me to enter the USA, they had a field to enter social media accounts.

This field is optional to fill in, but I bet a lot of people fill it in anyways.

I left that field blank.


Well, the article suggests they don't really need your help anyway.


I'd like to apologize for all social media posts before this one. I didn't mean anything I am alleged to have said.


> I didn't mean anything I am alleged to have said.

Yeah only a fool would take anything anyone writes on the internet as a sincere expression of belief. The internet, especially text heavy fora such as HN, Reddit, 4Chan, etc. are best used as a sounding board for thoughts and ideas you may have, but do not believe or have not yet determined the validity of. I love to take a hyperbolic stance of something i kind of think, or just an iconoclastic/heterodox stance and see how the discussion develops. This is immensely useful for clarifying my own thoughts and seeing how others think about a topic.


How is this legal? Most of the content people post is random and slightly political. It should be against the law to do this because the various government agencies will always be tied to one party or another.


> content people post is random and slightly political

It would be illegal for them to act on it. But I don’t think it’s illegal to correlate, particularly for public posts. (To be clear, I think this should be illegal.)

> various government agencies will always be tied to one party or another

No, they shouldn’t, haven’t generally been and are not over long time horizons.


Even if it is illegal for them to use it, the courts have ruled that law enforcement can use illegal tools during investigations, and then lie about it in court without compromising their case.

The legal term for this is “parallel construction”.

Even if the courts threw out cases that were built this way, it is hard to detect, and most cases don’t go to court.

Even if prosecutors behaved ethically, and didn’t pursue such cases, there are well-documented problems with organized crime infiltrating police departments, and then being difficult to bring to justice (e.g. LA’s deputy gangs have had control of a chunk of the LAPD for over 50 years).

The best solution is to ban the collection of the data in the first place.


> courts have ruled that law enforcement can use illegal tools during investigations, and then lie about it in court

No, they haven’t. Parallel construction is lying to the court about how you got your evidence. It’s never been court sanctioned to my knowledge.


From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and then passes it on to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer.[2] This practice gained support after the Supreme Court's 2009 Herring v. United States decision.[2]


> I don’t think it’s illegal to correlate, particularly for public posts.

I don't know if this law only affects business or the gov too, but the California Privacy Act says:

> The right to know about the personal information a business collects about them and how it is used and shared;

and also

> The right to limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information collected about them

but I'm pretty sure the gov will excuse themselves from laws made for businesses.

https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa


> the California Privacy Act says

California laws don’t bind the feds.


One reason that comes up every so often is that after someone goes extra crazy and kills a bunch of people his ( usually his for better or worse ) net presence is carefully scrutinized for any aberration that could have indicated he could and would have done it and then it is used to ask 'why didn't you some gov official do something?' And politicians like to stay in office.

Oddly, as bad as this practice is, it is likely one of the lower threats to privacy in US.


> I don’t think it’s illegal to correlate, particularly for public posts

in theory, it is, due to the blanket search provisions of the 4th Amendment. if you read the Federalist papers, it is absolutely what the 4th Amendment was created to prevent (although a far more automated approach than it ever envisioned).

in practice, the courts have weakened the 4th Amendment quite a bit, so it might be legal, technically.


Third-party doctrine, a loophole for the fourth amendment.


It problematic because it's inviting customs and immigration agents to act on their own personal religious and political biases.


It may not be. What are you going to do about it?


I already assume that the government has backdoors in every platform and can see who posted what. I'm more worried about cyberstakers and harassers using this to dox people they don't like.


The one you also have to keep in mind are edits and drafts.

So even if you don't post any wrongthink, the very act of typing it out, even without hitting "post" or "save", means its stored in some database ready for the regime to crush your social credit score, possibly ip to the FBI raid you.

I assume this applies to every "cloud" application on your desktop computer as well. Very little is offline unless you make a particular effort.


How could they even tie them, with rigor? Even if I says @happydude123 is me, there is no proof. Especially so now that keybase isn’t the same anymore.

I fully deny any acct. It’s spam. Stolen cloud photos. Bot. Etc. (and to be honest I no longer have a fb, insta, etc., so it’s easy.)


The article has some answers to how they can do it (advertising data, for instance). As for what happens if you deny it, well, you're not in a court. They don't have to prove it to any evidentiary standard and you may not even know why they decide to call you to the separate room for additional screening.


Another entry in the annals of things I'm supposed to freak out about China doing but not really care about happening at home.




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