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more on Anti-terrorism software that balances privacy and security?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:30:46 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com> Date: January 25, 2006 5:40:30 PM EST To: dave () farber net Cc: lauren () vortex comSubject: Re: [IP] more on Anti-terrorism software that balances privacy and security?
Dave, Reduced to its essentials, here is what I believe is the fundamental question in this regard (irrespective of the apparently misleading aspects of the UCLA press release). Is it in the interests of society to provide the powers-that-be with mass surveillance algorithms and/or tools that are relatively easy and inexpensive to deploy and use -- especially when all control and oversight is in the hands of the same or affiliated entities? My view is that the presence of considerable cost and other "friction" in such surveillance systems are crucial elements that help reduce (but are certainly not sufficient to eliminate) abuse of such capabilities and associated tradecraft. When we start to hear talk of highly-efficient surveillance tools designed to be widely deployed, alarm bells should start ringing. Some persons might applaud such systems in the hands of those that they trust, but we must assume that in the future such capabilities -- particularly if embedded within technological infrastructures and widely used systems -- may take their orders from authorities potentially ranging from irresponsible to genuinely evil. Too much efficiency in surveillance technology greatly increases the risks of abuse. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren () vortex com or lauren () pfir org Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 http://www.pfir.org/lauren Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, IOIC - International Open Internet Coalition - http://www.ioic.net Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com DayThink: http://daythink.vortex.com - - -
moraal; NEVER let PR folk at research papers or at least read the damn PE before you approve the relase. Dave Begin forwarded message: From: Peter Capek <capek () ieee org> Date: January 25, 2006 3:40:04 PM EST To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] Anti-terrorism software that balances privacy and security? There's a paper and set of charts describing this work available at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~rafail/PUBLIC/index.html Perhaps we can get one of the authors to elucidate this work. But I found the charts to be fairly clear. This work addresses the problem that the criteria used (all that's addressed is the presence of specific words) to find textual communication "of interest" are classified. Today, this necessitates gathering into a secure and classified environment ALL communication of interest, which has scaling, cost, reliability and perhaps other problems. The question the authors address is how to produce a program which can be used in a non-secure environment to scan text, and produce an encrypted version of interesting messages, which is then decrypted in a secure environment. (Think hashing and public key encryption.) The point is that it's not possible to tell, from the scanning program, which words caused a document to be interesting. I'm sure I've oversimplified this, but I think I have it essentially correct. It's really misleading to call it "anti-terrorism" software. And at this point, according to the charts at least, it's not software - only an approach and some theorems. Lastly, the article cited earlier is misleading in that it says the technique "[discards] communications from law-abiding citizens before they ever reach the intelligence community." This approach knows nothing about whether the people sending or receiving mail are law-abiding, or even whether they're citizens. Its operation is based solely on the presence of specific words in the message text, although I suppose some of those words could be e-mail addresses. Peter Capek ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lauren () pfir org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ipArchives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting- people/
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