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Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

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Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#31

Post by balabaster »

rtpg wrote: post #3

Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes >Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law. The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from…

With every new revelation, I'm less and less confident in the rule of law. I'm starting to believe that the NSA thinks that the law doesn't apply to them. So when you speak about faith in the rule of law - until this year, I might have been on your side. But lately, I'm not sure I have any faith in the rule of law anymore when it comes to government agencies.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#33

Post by lanaius »

Setting aside all of the other existing information, the crux of many of the arguments in the article depend on the government knowing the use of particular addresses. That's data most city/county/state governments already have laws that they should know (for tax assessments, occupancy limits, health inspections, census, etc.) and yet they frequently have incorrect or incomplete information on this.

While pervasive tracking is indeed a problematic state, I still find it humorous at how competent we truly believe the government to be in retaining accuracy in all this data given how often our interactions with government and private businesses revolve around them FIXING their data about us.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#34

Post by rtpg »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #22
rtpg wrote: post #3

Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes >Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law. The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from…

Lots of people have picked up on your thesis statement : This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law. We aren't talking about 'law' here, we're talking about 'people.' That gets lost some times. Someone with access to these tools might decide the shake down Jack with a bit of blackmail. They might decide to sell union organizing 'alerts' to business. These are not legal…

>Someone with access to these tools might decide the shake down Jack with a bit of blackmail. They might decide to sell union organizing 'alerts' to business. These are not legal but there are many people who work in an organization with these tools available who could justify abusing them.

The situation described in the article would require coordinating a lot of data together. I have a hard time seeing how individuals could do that properly without the institution noticing (especially considering how "Big Data" it is). It's not just cell data that you need, but also license plate scans, court records, etc. These are all fairly independent things, unlikely to be stored in the same place.

Individuals will try to exploit systems, and we should work hard to avoid things like LOVEINT happening (which shouldn't be hard in itself, but given that Snowden walked off with all those documents, the NSA doesn't seem very skilled in secure storage of documents).

If institutions work hard enough to make sure they're following the rules on document access, then it'll be harder for people to abuse, since each individual block of data is useless in itself. It would be the information equivalent of N keys to launch the nukes. Abuse would be much,much harder if somebody sat down and chmod'd some folders properly (nobody should have access to everything in any system). A plus side (for gov'ts at least), would be that Snowden-class events would be a lot harder to pull off.

Institutions can be built to be a lot harder to corrupt.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#35

Post by rhizome »

rtpg wrote: post #3

Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes >Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law. The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from…

We hear about old NSA programs that got shut down because of the FISA court's rulings.

Such as?

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#36

Post by nswanberg »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #2

A related experiment: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/

Nice. I was looking for that yesterday for the Google Location history discussion.

Digging through this site's javascript I found this comment: "Für diesen Quellcode komme ich nicht in den Himmel."

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#38

Post by api »

This indirectly makes a great point. While everyone's been talking about the danger of a turn-key totalitarian state -- the danger of intentional totalitarianism -- much less has been made of the danger of an unintentional totalitarian state arising from overzealous use of these systems by law enforcement. I think that's a much greater immediate risk.

Replace "DUI pattern detected" with "likely child predator." Just the insinuation that a person is a pedophile can destroy a person's life.

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#39

Post by wissler »

rtpg wrote: post #3

Meet Jack. Or what the government could do with all these planes >Article showing how half of San Francisco gets bombed This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law. The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from…

Have you seen this?:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_...

Re: Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data

#40

Post by cjoh »

It's easy to imagine the kind of data government has, imagine its ability to process that data, and easy to interpret that they will do it. But it's also important to recognize that this is conjecture.

From my experience in government: they nailed the user experience (check out http://dsbs.sba.gov for some awesome gov UI), but really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology like this.

I know this will make me unpopular amongst this crowd, but The truth is, I'm far more afraid of data like this getting into the wrong hands because it's being stored improperly or insecurely, than I am of government being malicious with it. Heck, I'm more afraid of my insurance adjuster than I am a malicious cop.

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