July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[liberationtech] Chinese preparing for a "Autonomous Internet" ?
by Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Hi all, i wanted to notice that there is a new internet draft in IETF that should make us think on the chinese government respect strategies to internet governance issues. DNS Extension for Autonomous Internet(AIP) https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-diao-aip-dns-00 This proposal by China Telecom, China Mobile & Guangdong Commercial College propose. Even if we know that "root servers" are very well distributed across the world / countries trough a collaborative system, chinese see this as a "central control". >From Introduction on Root DNS: " But its central control method is not suitable to autonomy and scalability and can't keep up with the fast development of Internet. To national internet network, owning its independent root DNS server and realize autonomy in Internet is a problem not only for the cost but also for the technical difficulty. It is almost impossible in current DNS architecture." >From AIP DNS Architecture: "In order to realize the transition from Internet to Autonomous Internet, each partition of current Internet should first realize possible self-government and gradually reduce its dependence on the foreign domain names, such as COM, NET et al." So basically the chinese play is not of being part of a collaborative internet, but driving strategically the direction to become an independent island in the world. -naif _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. You may ask for a reminder here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [liberationtech] Silent Circle Dangerous to Cryptography Software Development
by Katrin Verclas 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Having sat for the better part of the day with Phil Zimmerman with activists and journalists in a room, here is what I learned: On Oct 11, 2012, at 12:15 PM, Nadim Kobeissi wrote: > On 10/11/2012 12:04 PM, James Losey wrote: >> Hi Nadim, >> >> I largely agree with your assessment of Silent Circle and I offer these >> thoughts in an effort to increase my understanding of the issue. The >> product is a packaged "solution" clearly targeted towards business >> customers focused on corporate privacy. And while the company offeres >> regular transparency statements on government requests and strives to > > Unless hit by a search warrant and a gag order at the same time, or a > federal subpoena. Zimmerman stated that servers are located in Canada to avoid US subpoenas (not a lawyer, not sure what's that worth in the end). According to the Silent Circle website: Websites and products that donbt list the people behind the technology or where their servers are located, how the encryption keys are held or even how you can verify that your data is actually encrypted, are typical of the industry and provide only pseudo-security based on a lot of unverifiable trust. Our secure communications products use b Device to Device Encryptionb b putting the keys to your security in the palm of your hand (except for Silent Mail, which is configured for PGP Universal and utilizes server side key encryption). We DO NOT have the ability to decrypt your communications across our network and nor will anyone else - ever. Silent Phone, Silent Text and Silent Eyes all use peer-to-peer technology and erase the session keys from your device once the call or text is finished. Our servers donbt hold the keysb&you do. Our secure encryption keeps unauthorized people from understanding your transmissions. It keeps criminals, governments, business rivals, neighbors and identity thieves from stealing your data and from destroying your personal or corporate privacy. There are no back doors, nor will there ever be. More importantly, Zimmerman noted that Silent Circle code will be made available for audit. > >> minimize storage of some types of data (and you're right that payment >> info is problematic) the company is clearly interested in paying for >> privacy assurances and seems less focused on supporting activists. According to Zimmerman (who was keenly interested in use cases for activists) will make licenses available to activists at no cost. They have not figured out the process for this yet, but we'll certainly follow up with them. Katrin -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Anti-terrorism software that balances privacy and security?
by Ry Rivard 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dave, This seems interesting, but I'm skeptical about phrases like "mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer." If someone can explain this, that would be helpful. It seems either remarkable, somewhat exactly what already exists minus the impenetrability claim, or terribly over-hyped, or dangerous. _________________ Anti-terrorism software claims to balance privacy and security By BJS Created 01/24/2006 - 13:42 The government's ability to balance the privacy concerns of lawful U.S. citizens with effective monitoring of potential terrorists has proven an increasingly difficult task, particularly in recent months. But a landmark software development by researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science may ease some of these privacy concerns by making the tracking of terrorist communications over the Internet more efficient, and more targeted, than ever before. UCLA Engineering professor Rafail Ostrovsky and graduate researcher William Skeith have developed a new method to mine potential terrorist-related communications that essentially narrows down the data to only those documents that fit pre-set, secret criteria chosen by intelligence agencies. The new approach filters down the information from billions of communications to just those deemed essential ??? discarding communications from law-abiding citizens before they ever reach the intelligence community. That means lawful U.S. citizens who don't fit the parameters are automatically ruled out. The truly revolutionary facet of the technology is that it is a new and powerful example of a piece of code that has been mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer. In other words, it can't be analyzed to figure out its components, construction and inner workings, or reveal what information it's collecting and what information it's discarding ??? it won't give up its secrets. It can't be manipulated or turned against the user. Because the code cannot be analyzed, terrorists using the Internet to communicate will never know if the filter has pinpointed their data or not. For those seeking to thwart terrorism, this development means less data to store and wade through in a secure setting, and, ultimately, the ability to react more quickly, without fear of exposing top-secret search criteria and tipping off the terrorists. ..."Gathering data can be costly and time-consuming for intelligence agencies. All of the potential data must first be pulled offline into a trusted and classified environment, and then painstakingly sifted through," Ostrovsky said. "With this new technology, based on highly esoteric mathematics, the software can be distributed to many machines on the Internet, not necessarily trusted or highly secure. The software works by analyzing all of the data and then having the appearance of putting all the data into a 'secure box.' A secret filter inside the box dismisses some data as useless and collects only relevant data according to the confidential criteria that can be programmed into the software. And because it's all done inside encrypted code, it's not apparent which, if any, of the data has been selected and kept, except by the person who has deployed the filter and has the decryption key." The filter criteria can be reset as often as intelligence analysts deem necessary to keep up with the changing terminology of terrorists. "While a savvy person may be able to tell that the program is running in the background, they will not be able to tell what data is being selected," Ostrovsky explained. "For example, even if Al Qaeda had an extremely knowledgeable programmer and, say, they steal a laptop with this program, they would not be able to figure out which documents were selected and kept inside the 'secure box' and which were not. By distributing this software all over the Internet to providers and network administrators, you can easily monitor a huge data flow in a distributed, cost-efficient manner, and choose only those documents that look promising based on your secret criteria. The filter cannot be broken in the same sense that one cannot crack time???tested public???key encryption functions such as those already used for Internet commerce and banking applications. In that aspect, it's essentially a bullet-proof technology." ...Ostrovsky, who also directs the Center of Information and Computation Security at the school, said, "There have to be checks and balances. Like any tool, technology can be used for good or bad. I view this research as a new and viable way to combat terrorism that can also strike a balance with the need for strong privacy protections for ordinary citizens. It's an efficient data???gathering technology against the bad guys. In that sense, it could be an exciting new tool in the U.S. Department of Defense's arsenal against terror." The technology also has other potential privacy-enhancing applications. In addition to its use online, it also could be used by physicians wishing to search patient records for certain medical conditions while maintaining the patient's privacy from other workers in the office, among other functions. The researchers already have filed a patent on the work. For more information contact Melissa Abraham mabraham(a)support.ucla.edu Phone: 310-206-0540 Source URL: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/anti- terrorism_software_claims_to_balance_privacy_and_security_9862 -- Ry Rivard http://braxtonian.com ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] Anti-terrorism software that balances privacy and security?
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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Anti-terrorism software that balances privacy and security?
by Ry Rivard 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dave, This seems interesting, but I'm skeptical about phrases like "mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer." If someone can explain this, that would be helpful. It seems either remarkable, somewhat exactly what already exists minus the impenetrability claim, or terribly over-hyped, or dangerous. _________________ Anti-terrorism software claims to balance privacy and security By BJS Created 01/24/2006 - 13:42 The government's ability to balance the privacy concerns of lawful U.S. citizens with effective monitoring of potential terrorists has proven an increasingly difficult task, particularly in recent months. But a landmark software development by researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science may ease some of these privacy concerns by making the tracking of terrorist communications over the Internet more efficient, and more targeted, than ever before. UCLA Engineering professor Rafail Ostrovsky and graduate researcher William Skeith have developed a new method to mine potential terrorist-related communications that essentially narrows down the data to only those documents that fit pre-set, secret criteria chosen by intelligence agencies. The new approach filters down the information from billions of communications to just those deemed essential ??? discarding communications from law-abiding citizens before they ever reach the intelligence community. That means lawful U.S. citizens who don't fit the parameters are automatically ruled out. The truly revolutionary facet of the technology is that it is a new and powerful example of a piece of code that has been mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer. In other words, it can't be analyzed to figure out its components, construction and inner workings, or reveal what information it's collecting and what information it's discarding ??? it won't give up its secrets. It can't be manipulated or turned against the user. Because the code cannot be analyzed, terrorists using the Internet to communicate will never know if the filter has pinpointed their data or not. For those seeking to thwart terrorism, this development means less data to store and wade through in a secure setting, and, ultimately, the ability to react more quickly, without fear of exposing top-secret search criteria and tipping off the terrorists. ..."Gathering data can be costly and time-consuming for intelligence agencies. All of the potential data must first be pulled offline into a trusted and classified environment, and then painstakingly sifted through," Ostrovsky said. "With this new technology, based on highly esoteric mathematics, the software can be distributed to many machines on the Internet, not necessarily trusted or highly secure. The software works by analyzing all of the data and then having the appearance of putting all the data into a 'secure box.' A secret filter inside the box dismisses some data as useless and collects only relevant data according to the confidential criteria that can be programmed into the software. And because it's all done inside encrypted code, it's not apparent which, if any, of the data has been selected and kept, except by the person who has deployed the filter and has the decryption key." The filter criteria can be reset as often as intelligence analysts deem necessary to keep up with the changing terminology of terrorists. "While a savvy person may be able to tell that the program is running in the background, they will not be able to tell what data is being selected," Ostrovsky explained. "For example, even if Al Qaeda had an extremely knowledgeable programmer and, say, they steal a laptop with this program, they would not be able to figure out which documents were selected and kept inside the 'secure box' and which were not. By distributing this software all over the Internet to providers and network administrators, you can easily monitor a huge data flow in a distributed, cost-efficient manner, and choose only those documents that look promising based on your secret criteria. The filter cannot be broken in the same sense that one cannot crack time???tested public???key encryption functions such as those already used for Internet commerce and banking applications. In that aspect, it's essentially a bullet-proof technology." ...Ostrovsky, who also directs the Center of Information and Computation Security at the school, said, "There have to be checks and balances. Like any tool, technology can be used for good or bad. I view this research as a new and viable way to combat terrorism that can also strike a balance with the need for strong privacy protections for ordinary citizens. It's an efficient data???gathering technology against the bad guys. In that sense, it could be an exciting new tool in the U.S. Department of Defense's arsenal against terror." The technology also has other potential privacy-enhancing applications. In addition to its use online, it also could be used by physicians wishing to search patient records for certain medical conditions while maintaining the patient's privacy from other workers in the office, among other functions. The researchers already have filed a patent on the work. For more information contact Melissa Abraham mabraham(a)support.ucla.edu Phone: 310-206-0540 Source URL: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/anti- terrorism_software_claims_to_balance_privacy_and_security_9862 -- Ry Rivard http://braxtonian.com ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] Anti-terrorism software that balances privacy and security?
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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Can Tracking Phone Calls Ferret Out Terrorists?
by Matt Oristano 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Can Tracking Phone Calls Ferret Out Terrorists? The problem is distinguishing a book club planning a meeting from terrorists plotting an attack. By Associated Press BOSTON (AP) -- There's a lot we still don't know -- and may never know -- about the National Security Agency's surveillance of Americans' phone calls. But one striking tidbit has emerged: that the agency is mining phone records for patterns of terrorist activity. USA Today reported May 11 that the NSA was performing ''social network analysis'' to detect patterns of terrorist activity in its database of U.S. call records. In defending the program, Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., confirmed that the White House had told him the NSA was probing calling patterns to ''detect and track suspected terrorist activity.'' But is that really possible? The ''tracking'' part makes sense. Assuming that intelligence had sussed out suspected terrorists, certainly the vast database could be used to track whom those people had called. The ''detecting'' part, however, is another story. Can terrorists be spotted simply by analyzing who calls whom and when -- without any other leads? There's reason to be skeptical. That's because diverse kinds of human organizations share certain traits. If you and I and 17 other people are in a book club, we're likely to call each other often. Sometimes almost all of us would ring up just one person on the same day to ask, ''Can I bring dessert to tonight's meeting?'' Viewed in silhouette, in the cold analysis of a computer, it might indeed be apparent from our phone records that the 19 of us frequently communicate to plan something. But further investigation would be necessary to determine just what we were up to. Can the government dig deeper into all of these groups? Fortunately for the stability of society, but somewhat unfortunately for intelligence analysts, there are vastly more groups of 19 people organizing soccer games and bake sales than there are teams like the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11. ''Those patterns that we leave out there when we do things are going to look the same no matter what we're doing, and 99 percent of the time we're not going to be doing anything illegal,'' said Valdis Krebs, who consults with companies on the organizational insights they can glean from social network analysis. ''There probably isn't a pattern that's different from doing something bad vs. doing something good or something neutral.'' The Pentagon apparently isn't certain of that. It has funded research into a field known as ''scalable social network analysis'' that aims to identify whether terrorist plotting indeed leaves different organizational patterns from planning a bake sale. But Krebs doubts that enough terrorist cells have been mapped to provide a statistically significant sample of what those patterns are. The main point of social network analysis is to produce a map of how people in an organization tend to interact. By analyzing e-mail traffic or interviewing members of a group, for example, network analysts can reveal the strength of ties between people in an organization, and who the key hubs are. Sometimes that can explain who really deserves a raise. Or companies can buy social networking software that trolls through e-mail to determine who has the best contacts for a particular customer call. Of course, these kinds of analyses benefit tremendously from the fact that organizational boundaries are openly available. Analysts know a company exists. Its employees will fill out surveys to say whether that guy in marketing is a quiet leader or a quiet malingerer. ''It helps you understand trends, but I don't know of companies that are using social network analysis to discover bad guys without an entry point, just looking at the network structure,'' said Jeff Jonas, founder of Systems Research and Development, a company whose software analyzed records to tip Las Vegas casinos when people barred from gambling had associates working on staff. The company attracted investment from the CIA's venture unit even before Sept. 11 and last year was acquired by IBM Corp. ''If you're trying to root out a few bad apples using data-mining to look for anomalies, it's not clear to me that this would be productive without a starting point,'' said Jonas, who is now chief scientist in IBM's ''entity analytics'' unit. To put Jonas' point in other words: Merely mapping who Americans call likely wouldn't uncloak a terrorist cell. The necessary ''entry point'' would have to be if someone in the United States called or received a call from a number already suspected of being affiliated with U.S. enemies. (Jonas cites a chilling example of the process in action. In the '90s, reports emerged from Cali, Colombia, that a drug ring had identified and executed informants by getting Cali's phone records, then using a mainframe computer to compare the numbers dialed with those held by narcotics agents. It wouldn't have worked without the entry point of knowing which numbers belonged to the drug cops.) Following this chain of reasoning, another entry point could come if a group had been infiltrated somehow -- whether through a spy or by a tap providing the content of phone calls or e-mails. The New York Times reported in December that the NSA was indeed eavesdropping, without warrants, on communications between suspected al-Qaida members overseas and associates in the U.S. And a federal lawsuit in San Francisco claims the NSA gained access to AT&T Inc. communications traffic through a secret switching room. But while Bush administration officials haven't discussed details of the NSA database described by USA Today, they have insisted that conversations themselves aren't being broadly monitored. These somewhat sparse details leave questions as to the extent of government data-mining efforts. They could include cross-referencing the phone database with property, court and credit files sold by private database vendors. Or they could be part of grander sweeps like the one envisioned by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program. It was technically shuttered in a privacy uproar but is generally assumed to be continuing in various forms. Such uncertainty makes George Washington University law professor Daniel Solove disregard surveys such as the May 12 Washington Post- ABC News poll that found 63 percent of Americans supporting the call database as an anti-terrorism tactic. ''No one is asked in the polls, 'Would you approve of anything the government can do with your information? Is it OK that the government engages in various forms of snooping into your life that you would not be told or informed about?''' said Solove, author of ''The Digital Person.'' ''It's hard to really opine on something you don't know all the details of.'' One reason that social network analysis has gained prominence in recent years is that Krebs and other researchers applied the method to publicly available information after the Sept. 11 attack to map how the hijackers operated. Mohammed Atta, for example, was clearly a hub of the network. Krebs wonders whether those kinds of analyses raised expectations that the method could be insightful even in advance of an attack -- that the right dots could be connected if investigators just could gather enough dots. ''The intelligence community is dying to find the silver bullet that will prevent the next terrorist attack. Unfortunately there's plenty of vendors that will lead them on and claim that they have found it,'' Krebs said. ''I think it's alchemy of the 21st century to be able to predict the future, whether it's terrorism or the stock market or anything.'' Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com> ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[Dewayne-Net] Can Tracking Phone Calls Ferret Out Terrorists?
by Dewayne Hendricks 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

[Note: This item comes from reader Matt Oristano. DLH]

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Re: [cryptography] US Appeals Court upholds right not to decrypt a drive
by James A. Donald 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Truecrypt supports an inner and outer encrypted volume, encryption hidden inside encryption, the intended usage being that you reveal the outer encrypted volume, and refuse to admit the existence of the inner hidden volume. To summarize the judgment: Plausibile deniability, or even not very plausible deniability, means you don't have to produce the key for the inner volume. The government first has to *prove* that the inner volume exists, and contains something hot. Only then can it demand the key for the inner volume. Defendant revealed, or forensics discovered, the outer volume, which was completely empty. (Bad idea - you should have something there for plausible deniability, such as legal but mildly embarrassing pornography, and a complete operating system for managing your private business documents, protected by a password that forensics can crack with a dictionary attack) Forensics felt that with FIVE TERABYTES of seemingly empty truecrypt drives, there had to be an inner volume, but a strong odor of rat is no substitute for proof. (Does there exist FIVE TERABYTES of child pornography in the entire world?) Despite forensics suspicions, no one, except the defendant, knows whether there is an inner volume or not, and so the Judge invoked the following precedent. http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/201112268.pdf That producing the key is protected if "conceding the existence, possession, and control of the documents tended to incriminate" the defendant. The Judge concluded that in order to compel production of the key, the government has to first prove that specific identified documents exist, and are in the possession and control of the defendant, for example the government would have to prove that the encrypted inner volume existed, was controlled by the defendant, and that he had stored on it a movie called "Lolita does LA", which the police department wanted to watch. _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Can Tracking Phone Calls Ferret Out Terrorists?
by Matt Oristano 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Can Tracking Phone Calls Ferret Out Terrorists? The problem is distinguishing a book club planning a meeting from terrorists plotting an attack. By Associated Press BOSTON (AP) -- There's a lot we still don't know -- and may never know -- about the National Security Agency's surveillance of Americans' phone calls. But one striking tidbit has emerged: that the agency is mining phone records for patterns of terrorist activity. USA Today reported May 11 that the NSA was performing ''social network analysis'' to detect patterns of terrorist activity in its database of U.S. call records. In defending the program, Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., confirmed that the White House had told him the NSA was probing calling patterns to ''detect and track suspected terrorist activity.'' But is that really possible? The ''tracking'' part makes sense. Assuming that intelligence had sussed out suspected terrorists, certainly the vast database could be used to track whom those people had called. The ''detecting'' part, however, is another story. Can terrorists be spotted simply by analyzing who calls whom and when -- without any other leads? There's reason to be skeptical. That's because diverse kinds of human organizations share certain traits. If you and I and 17 other people are in a book club, we're likely to call each other often. Sometimes almost all of us would ring up just one person on the same day to ask, ''Can I bring dessert to tonight's meeting?'' Viewed in silhouette, in the cold analysis of a computer, it might indeed be apparent from our phone records that the 19 of us frequently communicate to plan something. But further investigation would be necessary to determine just what we were up to. Can the government dig deeper into all of these groups? Fortunately for the stability of society, but somewhat unfortunately for intelligence analysts, there are vastly more groups of 19 people organizing soccer games and bake sales than there are teams like the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11. ''Those patterns that we leave out there when we do things are going to look the same no matter what we're doing, and 99 percent of the time we're not going to be doing anything illegal,'' said Valdis Krebs, who consults with companies on the organizational insights they can glean from social network analysis. ''There probably isn't a pattern that's different from doing something bad vs. doing something good or something neutral.'' The Pentagon apparently isn't certain of that. It has funded research into a field known as ''scalable social network analysis'' that aims to identify whether terrorist plotting indeed leaves different organizational patterns from planning a bake sale. But Krebs doubts that enough terrorist cells have been mapped to provide a statistically significant sample of what those patterns are. The main point of social network analysis is to produce a map of how people in an organization tend to interact. By analyzing e-mail traffic or interviewing members of a group, for example, network analysts can reveal the strength of ties between people in an organization, and who the key hubs are. Sometimes that can explain who really deserves a raise. Or companies can buy social networking software that trolls through e-mail to determine who has the best contacts for a particular customer call. Of course, these kinds of analyses benefit tremendously from the fact that organizational boundaries are openly available. Analysts know a company exists. Its employees will fill out surveys to say whether that guy in marketing is a quiet leader or a quiet malingerer. ''It helps you understand trends, but I don't know of companies that are using social network analysis to discover bad guys without an entry point, just looking at the network structure,'' said Jeff Jonas, founder of Systems Research and Development, a company whose software analyzed records to tip Las Vegas casinos when people barred from gambling had associates working on staff. The company attracted investment from the CIA's venture unit even before Sept. 11 and last year was acquired by IBM Corp. ''If you're trying to root out a few bad apples using data-mining to look for anomalies, it's not clear to me that this would be productive without a starting point,'' said Jonas, who is now chief scientist in IBM's ''entity analytics'' unit. To put Jonas' point in other words: Merely mapping who Americans call likely wouldn't uncloak a terrorist cell. The necessary ''entry point'' would have to be if someone in the United States called or received a call from a number already suspected of being affiliated with U.S. enemies. (Jonas cites a chilling example of the process in action. In the '90s, reports emerged from Cali, Colombia, that a drug ring had identified and executed informants by getting Cali's phone records, then using a mainframe computer to compare the numbers dialed with those held by narcotics agents. It wouldn't have worked without the entry point of knowing which numbers belonged to the drug cops.) Following this chain of reasoning, another entry point could come if a group had been infiltrated somehow -- whether through a spy or by a tap providing the content of phone calls or e-mails. The New York Times reported in December that the NSA was indeed eavesdropping, without warrants, on communications between suspected al-Qaida members overseas and associates in the U.S. And a federal lawsuit in San Francisco claims the NSA gained access to AT&T Inc. communications traffic through a secret switching room. But while Bush administration officials haven't discussed details of the NSA database described by USA Today, they have insisted that conversations themselves aren't being broadly monitored. These somewhat sparse details leave questions as to the extent of government data-mining efforts. They could include cross-referencing the phone database with property, court and credit files sold by private database vendors. Or they could be part of grander sweeps like the one envisioned by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program. It was technically shuttered in a privacy uproar but is generally assumed to be continuing in various forms. Such uncertainty makes George Washington University law professor Daniel Solove disregard surveys such as the May 12 Washington Post- ABC News poll that found 63 percent of Americans supporting the call database as an anti-terrorism tactic. ''No one is asked in the polls, 'Would you approve of anything the government can do with your information? Is it OK that the government engages in various forms of snooping into your life that you would not be told or informed about?''' said Solove, author of ''The Digital Person.'' ''It's hard to really opine on something you don't know all the details of.'' One reason that social network analysis has gained prominence in recent years is that Krebs and other researchers applied the method to publicly available information after the Sept. 11 attack to map how the hijackers operated. Mohammed Atta, for example, was clearly a hub of the network. Krebs wonders whether those kinds of analyses raised expectations that the method could be insightful even in advance of an attack -- that the right dots could be connected if investigators just could gather enough dots. ''The intelligence community is dying to find the silver bullet that will prevent the next terrorist attack. Unfortunately there's plenty of vendors that will lead them on and claim that they have found it,'' Krebs said. ''I think it's alchemy of the 21st century to be able to predict the future, whether it's terrorism or the stock market or anything.'' Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com> ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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