Spying on the citizenry used to be a lot harder.
Sifting through the patriots to find the radicals required elbow grease and Senate subcommittee hearings. Sometimes you actually had to have personal contact with the suspect and do some legwork. Put a tail on the target. Talk to his neighbors. Go through his garbage. You had to be super-sneaky.
Last September, for instance, it was reported that a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request by the New York Times had revealed that civil rights photographer Earnest C. Withers was a paid informant for the F.B.I. from 1968 through 1970. Withers was “one of the most celebrated of the civil rights era,” the Times wrote. Deeply trusted, he had rare access. He was in Dr. Martin Luther King’s hotel room the night he died.
Knowing radicals’ habits and what they were thinking required legwork, cold-blooded deceit. The government had to employ informants.
Now it’s looking to hire programmers and Web specialists with experience building and managing social networks and sifting data for trends. Snooping can be done in an ergonomic chair, using a mouse.
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Network Neutrality watchdogs and civil libertarians have long suspected that the government must be using the information generated by online social networks—such as Facebook, Twitter and other online sites where people congregate.
While sites like Facebook furnish a free service to their registered users, the information users provide the service is worth billions for the companies that host these social networks. Instead of rifling through your trash cans to figure out where you eat, how you spend your money and who your associates are, marketers simply buy the data. Why should only private corporations get to sift through the numbers to fine-tune their business strategies? Shouldn’t the government take a look, too?
When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rejected a request for information about its online surveillance techniques, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Berkeley Law’s Samuelson Clinic filed a joint Freedom of Information Act request to various federal agencies for documentation on such activities. This summer the requests began bearing fruit; the EFF reported that it had found evidence that the government has been considering using data gleaned from social networking sites in ways that go beyond investigating crimes.
A 2008 report studying the potential use of the Internet in government security searches showed that government-hired investigators had flagged “53 percent of the 349 participants” they had been asked to review. Flags indicated a proclivity to place personal information online, but also included “questionable” disclosures of “underage drinking, profanity, extreme religious and/or political views on public forums.”
Several documents the CIA disclosed, the EFF reported, “discuss the CIA’s so-called Open Source Center, established in 2005, which has been collecting information from publicly accessible Internet sources such as blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites, in addition to monitoring radio and television programs…. It is accessible to almost 15,000 local, state, and federal government employees and offers products ranging from reports and analysis on publicly available information dating back to the mid-’90s, video reports and [I]nternet clips, translations, and media mapping and hot spot analysis.”
In October, EFF found evidence of two specific cases in which the government was using the Internet to track people. The online identities of applicants for U.S. citizenship were reviewed, and the DHS heavily monitored the Internet during President Obama’s inauguration.
While there are good reasons for the government to use all the tools at its disposal to counter illegal activity, there’s much in the documents that raises questions as to whether all the government’s online activity has itself been legal, and whether its attitude toward those it watches is purely that of a public servant protecting the rights of the taxpayer.
A May 2008 memo by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on the importance of social networking stated:
“Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS [Office of Fraud Detection and National Security] to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.
“This social networking gives FDNS an opportunity to reveal fraud by browsing these sites to see if petitioners and beneficiaries are in a valid relationship or trying to deceive [U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services] about their relationship. Once a user posts online, they create a public record and timeline of their activities. In essence, using MySpace and other sites is akin to doing an unannounced cyber ‘site-visit’ on a [sic] petitioners and beneficiaries.”
From a released PowerPoint slide presentation, the EFF learned that leading up to Obama’s inauguration, the DHS established a Social Networking Monitoring Center (SNMC) to monitor for “items of interest.” The slides instruct prospective investigators at length about privacy issues and how to separate “personally identifiable information” (PII) from the data collected. When listing sites that are “candidates for analysis,” though, they cast a very wide net, recommending investigators look at Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Blogger, Wikipedia and Craigslist, suggesting that everyone and everything is an “item of interest.”
Further, those “candidates for analysis” that could show some narrowing of focus are sites such as BlackPlanet (targeted to African Americans) and MiGente (Hispanics). Political sites of interest are DailyKos and NPR, but Fox News doesn’t appear to rate.
EFF also points out that stripping personal information from data is not an ironclad safeguard. A 2008 report from the University of Texas entitled “Robust De-anonymization of Large Datasets” showed that if there was enough data to work with, researchers could identify an individual within the data with only a few additional personal identifiers. These researchers used Netflix’s anonymous movie ratings of its half-million members as their data source, and they “successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information.”
If the personal information isn’t separated from the data, of course, it’s that much easier to track an individual. In October, a Wall Street Journal investigation reported, “Many of the most popular applications, or ‘apps,’ on the social networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies.” Facebook has responded that they are working to fix the unintentional leak, but this is at least the second time this year Facebook users have found that information they had been promised would be private was, in fact, on demand for any company or government who could afford it, available in an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Spying on the citizenry has never been easier.
