April 2009 - cypherpunks-legacy

N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress
by Eugen Leitl 16 Apr '09

16 Apr '09

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=12398… April 16, 2009 N.S.A.bs Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN WASHINGTON b The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews. Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in b overcollectionb of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional. The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.bs surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court, said the intelligence officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because N.S.A. activities are classified. Classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts. The Justice Department, in response to inquiries from The New York Times, acknowledged Wednesday night that there had been problems with the N.S.A. surveillance operation, but said they had been resolved. As part of a periodic review of the agencybs activities, the department b detected issues that raised concerns,b it said. Justice Department officials then b took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into complianceb with the law and court orders, the statement said. It added that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. went to the national security court to seek a renewal of the surveillance program only after new safeguards were put in place. In a statement on Wednesday night, the N.S.A. said that its b intelligence operations, including programs for collection and analysis, are in strict accordance with U.S. laws and regulations.b The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems but said in a statement that b when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them.b The questions may not be settled yet. Intelligence officials say they are still examining the scope of the N.S.A. practices, and Congressional investigators say they hope to determine if any violations of Americansb privacy occurred. It is not clear to what extent the agency may have actively listened in on conversations or read e-mail messages of Americans without proper court authority, rather than simply obtained access to them. The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the governmentbs wiretapping powers, and the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects. While the N.S.A.bs operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agencybs attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said. After a contentious three-year debate that was set off by the disclosure in 2005 of the program of wiretapping without warrants that President George W. Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress gave the N.S.A. broad new authority to collect, without court-approved warrants, vast streams of international phone and e-mail traffic as it passed through American telecommunications gateways. The targets of the eavesdropping had to be b reasonably believedb to be outside the United States. Under the new legislation, however, the N.S.A. still needed court approval to monitor the purely domestic communications of Americans who came under suspicion. In recent weeks, the eavesdropping agency notified members of the Congressional intelligence committees that it had encountered operational and legal problems in complying with the new wiretapping law, Congressional officials said. Officials would not discuss details of the overcollection problem because it involves classified intelligence-gathering techniques. But the issue appears focused in part on technical problems in the N.S.A.bs ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas as it uses its access to American telecommunications companiesb fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages. One official said that led the agency to inadvertently b targetb groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority. Officials are still trying to determine how many violations may have occurred. The overcollection problems appear to have been uncovered as part of a twice-annual certification that the Justice Department and the director of national intelligence are required to give to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on the protocols that the N.S.A. is using in wiretapping. That review, officials said, began in the waning days of the Bush administration and was continued by the Obama administration. It led intelligence officials to realize that the N.S.A. was improperly capturing information involving significant amounts of American traffic. Notified of the problems by the N.S.A., officials with both the House and Senate intelligence committees said they had concerns that the agency had ignored civil liberties safeguards built into last yearbs wiretapping law. b We have received notice of a serious issue involving the N.S.A., and webve begun inquiries into it,b a Congressional staff member said. Separate from the new inquiries, the Justice Department has for more than two years been investigating aspects of the N.S.A.bs wiretapping program. As part of that investigation, a senior F.B.I. agent recently came forward with what the inspector generalbs office described as accusations of b significant misconductb in the surveillance program, people with knowledge of the investigation said. Those accusations are said to involve whether the N.S.A. made Americans targets in eavesdropping operations based on insufficient evidence tying them to terrorism. And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said. The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact b as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 b with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressmanbs conversations, the official said. The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

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DARPA AI will trawl petabytes of UAV vid for enemy cows
by Eugen Leitl 16 Apr '09

16 Apr '09

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/15/darpa_deep_learning/print.html DARPA AI will trawl petabytes of UAV vid for enemy cows Will see horses, deduce existence of evil cattle By Lewis Page Posted in Science, 15th April 2009 15:13 GMT Renowned Pentagon tech-tomfoolery agency DARPA has announced a new plan to create mighty artificial intelligences. The so-called "Deep Learning" machines will be used to trawl through petabytes of video from robot aircraft prowling the skies - initially, apparently, seeking out threatening horses and cows. According to DARPA boffinry chiefs, setting out the rationale for "Deep Learning" technology, the US military and spook communities are hip-deep in surveillance and intel data, and sinking fast. Hence the need for artificial intelligence (ha ha): A rapidly increasing volume of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) information is available to the Department of Defense (DOD) as a result of the increasing numbers, sophistication, and resolution of ISR resources and capabilities. The amount of video data produced annually by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) alone is in the petabyte range, and growing rapidly. Full exploitation of this information is a major challenge. Human observation and analysis of ISR assets is essential, but the training of humans is both expensive and time-consuming. Human performance also varies due to individualsb capabilities and training, fatigue, boredom, and human attentional capacity. One response to this situation is to employ machines ... It seems there are already plenty of basic "shallow learning" AIs in use, including such Stone Age expedients as "Support Vector Machines (SVMs), two-layer Neural Networks (NNs), and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs)". But these are scarcely better than a human with poor "attentional capacity"*. The trouble with the shallow learners is that they can learn, erm, only at a shallow level: Shallow methods may be effective in creating simple internal representations ... A classification task such as recognizing a horse in an image will use these simple representations in many different configurations to recognize horses in various poses, orientations and sizes. Such a task requires large amounts of labelled images of horses and non-horses. This means that if the task were to change to recognizing cows, one would have to start nearly from scratch with a new, large set of labelled data. In essence, a specialised horse-spotter machine unable to recognise a cow isn't much use for sorting the sheep from the goats. (We're plainly in the War On Livestock here.) That's why DARPA want "deeply layered" learning machines, able to apply horse sense to recognising cows, sheep and goats. Deeply layered methods should create richer representations that may include furry, four-legged mammals at higher levels, resulting in a head start for learning cows and thereby requiring much less labelled data when compared to a shallow method. A Deep Learning system exposed to unlabelled natural images will automatically create high-level concepts of four-legged mammals on its own, even without labels. The existence of horses logically implies that there must be other furry four-legged mammals. And horseshit, of course. Basically, then, the Deep Learning machine, seeing horses, would develop the concept of sheep, goats and cows. In fact it will develop a lot of concepts, according to DARPA: Before you have a label, you must have a concept to label.The Deep Learning program assumes the ability to learn from unlabelled data in the first phase of the envisioned program. So the machine will be given access to the multi-petabyte robo-vid surveillance archives of the Pentagon, and start developing unknown concepts on its own using that data as a base. Here are a couple of samples, courtesy of Multi National Forces Iraq HQ: Perhaps the computer will deduce the existence of hostile two-legged mammals, which must and will be exterminated using smart weapons. Or it may fall back on early programming and start a savage global war against all cloven-footed animals. Pleasingly, there will be chances to see what the technology does with different data sets - provided we aren't all wiped out at once - as DARPA says it will release all its kit for others to play with. A further end objective of the Deep Learning program is to support increased growth and development of the broader machine-learning community by making publicly available many, if not all, Deep Learning software modules, algorithmic approaches, evaluation criteria and datasets in several application domains for use by researchers. There's more from DARPA in pdf here (https://www.fbo.gov/download/f45/f451dac7a3cbcd699ca5f4cdcba862a9/Deep_Lear…) B. * Aiee!

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Eyeball spy turns the tables on Big Brother
by Eugen Leitl 16 Apr '09

16 Apr '09

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227035.500-eyeball-spy-turns-the-ta… Eyeball spy turns the tables on Big Brother * 14 April 2009 by Paul Marks A gaze-tracking camera system analyses the gaze of CCTV operators as they work to highlight any neglected screens (Image: fishmonk, stock.xchng) Editorial: Who watches the watchers? AN ORWELLIAN nightmare it may be to many of us, but CCTV is a boat full of holes to the organisations that pay for it. That's because the people watching CCTV images back in the control rooms often have too many screens to monitor at once, and so may miss the criminal or antisocial activities they are there to spot. To the rescue of Big Brother's limited attention capabilities come Ulas Vural and Yusuf Akgul of the Gebze Institute of Technology in Turkey, who have developed a gaze-tracking camera system that watches the eyeballs of CCTV operators as they work. It then automatically produces a summary of the CCTV video sequences they have missed during their shift. "This increases the reliability of the surveillance system by giving a second chance to the operator," the researchers write in the journal Pattern Recognition Letters (DOI: 10.1016/j.patrec.2009.03.002). The system uses webcam-style cameras trained on the irises of the CCTV operators. From this, software works out where the operators are looking as they stare at each monitor - and the areas they have not been paying attention to. From this it creates a video of what they missed, for them and their bosses to watch at the end of their shift. To make sure the summary can be watched as quickly as possible, Vural and Akgul have developed an algorithm that discards frames that show only the background with no people or moving vehicles in them, to leave only a few key frames for each scene of interest. Vural says the system runs on a standard PC and processes the images in real time, so the summary frames are ready to browse, like a fast-motion flip book, at the end of the shift. Privacy campaigners may enjoy the irony if the gaze-tracking system comes to be regarded as intrusive by CCTV operators - who could fear that employers will use it to dispense with their services if they consistently miss too much on-screen skulduggery. The gaze-tracking system may well be regarded as intrusive by CCTV control-room staff Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, a smart software company based in the UK that has created its own CCTV analysis algorithms, points out that gaze does not prove that an operator is registering the action. "They may be looking but not seeing," he says.

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15 Apr '09

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