Authors: Bruce Schneier
store every tweet ever sent:
K. Young (6 Sep 2012), “How much would it cost to store the entire Twitter Firehose?”
Mortar: Data Science at Scale
, http://blog.mortardata.com/post/31027073689/how-much-would-it-cost-to-store-the-entire-twitter.
every phone call ever made:
Brewster Kahle (2013), “Cost to store all US phonecalls made in a year so it could
be datamined,” https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuqlWHQKlooOdGJrSzhBVnh0WGlzWHpCZFNVcURkX0E#gid=0.
In 2013, the NSA completed:
James Bamford (15 Mar 2012), “The NSA is building the country’s biggest spy center
(watch what you say),”
Wired
, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all.
third largest in the world:
Forbes (19 Oct 2012), “The 5 largest data centers in the world,”
Forbes
, http://www.forbes.com/pictures/fhgl45ijg/range-international-information-hub.
The details are classified:
Kashmir Hill (24 Jul 2013), “Blueprints of NSA’s ridiculously expensive data center
in Utah suggest it holds less info than thought,”
Forbes
, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprints-of-nsa-data-center-in-utah-suggest-its-storage-capacity-is-less-impressive-than-thought.
cost $1.4 billion so far:
Siobhan Gorman (21 Oct 2013), “Contractors fight over delays to NSA data center,”
Wall Street Journal
, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1
000
1424052702303672404579149902978119902.
Google has the capacity:
Randall Munro (2013), “Google’s datacenters on punch cards,”
What If? XKCD
, https://what-if.xkcd.com/63.
In 2011, Schrems demanded:
Cyrus Farivar (15 Nov 2012), “How one law student is making Facebook get serious
about privacy,”
Ars Technica
, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/how-one-law-student-is-making-facebook-get-serious-about-privacy.
Olivia Solon (28 Dec 2012), “How much data did Facebook have on one man? 1,200 pages
of data in 57 categories,”
BBC News
, http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/12/start/privacy-versus-facebook.
Facebook sent him a CD:
Schrems’s discovery led him to file a class action lawsuit against Facebook. Liat
Clark (1 Aug 2014), “Facebook hit with international class action lawsuit,”
Wired UK
, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-08/01/facebook-class-action-lawsuit.
2: DATA AS SURVEILLANCE
what we know about the NSA’s surveillance:
Previous leakers include Thomas Drake, Mark Klein, and Bill Binney. Subsequent leakers
have not been identified yet. Bruce Schneier (7 Aug 2014), “The US intelligence community
has a third leaker,”
Schneier on Security
, https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/08/the_us_intellig.html.
NSA collects the cell phone call records:
Glenn Greenwald (5 Jun 2013), “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon
customers daily,”
Guardian
, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order.
One government defense:
Barack Obama (7 Jun 2013), “Statement by the President,” US Executive Office of the
President, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/07/statement-president.
James R. Clapper (7 Jun 2013), “DNI statement on recent unauthorized disclosures of
classified information,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-press-releases-2013/868-dni-statement-on-recent-unauthorized-disclosures-of-classified-information.
Ed O’Keefe (6 Jun 2013), “Transcript: Dianne Feinstein, Saxby Chambliss explain, defend
NSA phone records program,”
Washington Post
, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/06/06/transcript-dianne-feinstein-saxby-chambliss-explain-defend-nsa-phone-records-program.
The intended point:
Am I the only one who finds it suspicious that President Obama always uses very specific
words? He says things like, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” This leaves
open the possibility that the NSA is recording, transcribing,
and analyzing your phone calls—and, very occasionally, reading them. This is more
likely to be true, and something a pedantically minded president could claim he wasn’t
lying about.
Collecting metadata on people:
This is a good general article on the intimacy of metadata. Dahlia Lithwick and Steve
Vladeck (22 Nov 2013), “Taking the ‘meh’ out of metadata,”
Slate
, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/11/nsa_and_metadata_how_the_government_can_spy_on_your_health_political_beliefs.html.
Phone metadata reveals:
Edward W. Felten (23 Aug 2013), “Declaration of Professor Edward W. Felten,”
American Civil Liberties Union et al. v. James R. Clapper et al
., United States District Court, Southern District of New York (Case 1:13-cv-03994-WHP),
https://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/natsec/clapper/2013.08.26%20ACLU%20PI%20Brief%20-%20Declaration%20-%20Felten.pdf.
It provides a window:
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye et al. (2–5 Apr 2013), “Predicting people personality
using novel mobile phone-based metrics,” 6th International Conference on Social Computing,
Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction, Washington, D.C., http://realitycommons.media.mit.edu/download.php?file=deMontjoye2013predicting-citation.pdf.
It yields a detailed summary:
IBM offers a class in analyzing phone call metadata. IBM Corporation (2014), “9T225G:
Telephone analysis using i2 Analyst’s Notebook,” http://www-03.ibm.com/services/learning/content/ites.wss/zz/en?pageType=course_description&courseCode=9T225G&cc=.
personal nature of what the researchers:
Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler (12 Mar 2014), “MetaPhone: The sensitivity of
telephone metadata,”
Web Policy
, http://webpolicy.org/2014/03/12/metaphone-the-sensitivity-of-telephone-metadata.
Web search data is another source:
While it seems obvious that this is data and not metadata, it seems to be treated
as metadata by the NSA. I believe its justification is that the search terms are encoded
in the URLs. The NSA’s XKEYSCORE slides talked about collecting “web-based searches,”
which further indicates that the NSA considers this metadata. Glenn Greenwald (31
Jul 2013), “XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet,’”
Guardian
, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data.
The NSA claims it’s metadata:
This demonstrates that the difference is more legal hairsplitting than anything else.
When I typed “should I tell my w”:
It’s the same with “should I tell my girlfriend.”
Google knows who clicked:
Arwa Mahdawi (22 Oct 2013), “Google’s autocomplete spells out our darkest thoughts,”
Guardian
, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/22/google-autocomplete-un-women-ad-discrimination-algorithms.
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt admitted:
Derek Thompson (1 Oct 2010), “Google’s CEO: ‘The laws are written by lobbyists,’”
Atlantic
, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/googles-ceo-the-laws-are-written-by-lobbyists/63908.
Your tweets tell the world:
You can search for the sleep patterns of any Twitter user. Amit Agarwal (2013), “Sleeping
Time,”
Digital Inspiration
, http://sleepingtime.org.
Your buddy lists and address books:
Two studies of Facebook social graphs show how easy it is to predict these and other
personal traits. Carter Jernigan and Behram R. T. Mistree (5 Oct 2009), “Gaydar: Facebook
friendships expose sexual orientation,”
First Monday
14, http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2611/2302. Michal Kosinski,
David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel (11 Mar 2013), “Private traits and attributes are
predictable from digital records of human behavior,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Early
Edition)
, http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/03/06/1218772110.abstract.
Your e-mail headers reveal:
The MIT Media Lab tool Immersion builds a social graph from your e-mail metadata.
MIT Media Lab (2013), “Immersion: A people-centric view of your email life,” https://immersion.media.mit.edu.
Metadata can be much more revealing:
Brian Lam (19 Jun 2013), “Phew, NSA is just collecting metadata. (You should still
worry),”
Wired
, http://www.wired.com/2013/06/phew-it-was-just-metadata-not-think-again.
metadata is far more meaningful:
Edward W. Felten (23 Aug 2013), “Declaration of Professor Edward W. Felten,”
American Civil Liberties Union et al. v. James R. Clapper et al
., United States District Court, Southern District of New York (Case 1:13-cv-03994-WHP),
https://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/natsec/clapper/2013.08.26%20ACLU%20PI%20Brief%20-%20Declaration%20-%20Felten.pdf.
“If you have enough metadata”:
Alan Rusbridger (21 Nov 2013), “The Snowden leaks and the public,”
New York Review of Books
, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/21/snowden-leaks-and-public.
“We kill people based on metadata”:
David Cole (10 May 2014), “‘We kill people based on metadata,’”
New York Review of Books
, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata.
one spy for every 166 citizens:
John O. Koehler (1999),
Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police,
Westview Press, http://books.google.com/books?id=waxWwxY1tt8C.
Roving wiretaps meant:
Mary DeRosa (2005), “Section 206: Roving surveillance authority under FISA: A summary,”
Patriot Debates
, http://apps.americanbar.org/natsecurity/patriotdebates/section-206.
The motivations are different:
David Lyon makes this point. David Lyon (2003),
Surveillance after September 11
, Polity, http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=0745631819.
Another device allows me to see all the data:
BrickHouse Security (2014), “iPhone / Android Spy Stick,”
Skymall
, https://www.skymall.com/iphone-%2F-android-spy-stick/28033GRP.html.
I can buy a keyboard logger:
Keyloggers.com (2014), “Top keyloggers of 2014 comparison and reviews,” http://www.keyloggers.com.
I can buy call intercept software:
Stealth Genie (2014), “Live call intercept,” http://www.stealthgenie.com/features/live-call-intercept.html.
I can buy a remote-controlled drone helicopter:
Amazon.com (2014), “DJI Phantom 2 Ready to Fly Quadcopter - With Zenmuse H3-2D Camera
Gimbal: $959.00 (list $999),” Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/Dji-Phantom-Ready-Fly-Quadcopter/dp/B00H7HPU54.
Professional surveillance devices:
There are prototypes for flying sensors that resemble birds and insects, and even
smaller sensors—no larger than dust particles—that will float around in the wind.
Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker (19 Jun 2011), “War evolves with drones, some
tiny as bugs,”
New York Times
, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html. John W. Whitehead (15 Apr
2013), “Roaches, mosquitoes, and birds: The coming micro-drone revolution,” Rutherford
Institute,
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/roaches_mosquitoes_and_birds_the_coming_micro_drone_revolution.
Sprint charges law enforcement:
Ashkan Soltani (9 Jan 2014), “The cost of surveillance,” http://ashkansoltani.org/2014/01/09/the-cost-of-surveillance.
Kevin S. Bankston and Ashkan Soltani (9 Jan 2014), “Tiny constables and the cost of
surveillance: Making cents out of
United States v. Jones
,”
Yale Law Journal
123, http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/tiny-constables-and-the-cost-of-surveillance-making-cents-out-of-united-states-v-jones.
FBI was required to:
Carrie Johnson (21 Mar 2012), “FBI still struggling with Supreme Court’s GPS ruling,”
NPR Morning Edition
, http://www.npr.org/2012/03/21/149011887/fbi-still-struggling-with-supreme-courts-gps-ruling.
the repossession business:
Shawn Musgrave (5 Mar 2014), “A vast hidden surveillance network runs across America,
powered by the repo industry,”
BetaBoston/Boston Globe
, http://betaboston.com/news/2014/03/05/a-vast-hidden-surveillance-network-runs-across-america-powered-by-the-repo-industry.
Shawn Musgrave (5 Mar 2014), “Massive license plate location database just like Instagram,
Digital Recognition Network insists,”
BetaBoston/Boston Globe
, http://betaboston.com/news/2014/03/05/massive-license-plate-location-database-just-like-instagram-digital-recognition-network-insists.
2.5 billion records:
Vigilant Video (23 Feb 2009), “Site specific preparation sheet for LEARN V.4.0 server
installation,” https://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/ALPR/texas/alprpra_portharthurPD_portarthurtx%20%287%29.pdf.
In addition to repossession businesses:
Cyrus Farivar (27 Feb 2012), “Your car, tracked: The rapid rise of license plate
readers,”
Ars Technica
, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/your-car-tracked-the-rapid-rise-of-license-plate-readers.
Catherine Crump (18 Jul 2013), “You are being tracked: How license plate readers are
being used to record Americans’ movements,” American Civil Liberties Union, https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/071613-aclu-alprreport-opt-v05.pdf.