more on Data mining of Amazon wishlists

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Krulwich <krulwich () yahoo com>
Date: January 9, 2006 1:47:02 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Cc: krulwich () yahoo com
Subject: Re: [IP] Data mining of Amazon wishlists
Reply-To: krulwich () yahoo com

Dave,

I had a short article in Business2.0 a few years ago about reasons  
that people
opt out of privacy, and in short, we need to distinguish both online and
offline between areas where government (or others) invade our privacy by
force, and where people give up an element of privacy for another  
benefit.

Government cameras tracking everyone on highways would be one thing.   
An EZ
Pass system where people tradeoff the loss of privacy against  
convenience is
another.

Having phone calls or emails snooped is one thing.  Joining a service  
that
lets your friends know what to buy you is a rational trade-off decision.

Combining the two doesn't help the fight against the first type,  
where people
have no choice.

--Bruce


--- David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Tony Wasserman <tonyw () acm org>
> Date: January 8, 2006 2:20:22 PM EST
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Data mining of Amazon wishlists
>
> For IP, if you like.
>
> Do you have the Quran (Koran) on your Amazon wish list? How about
> something by Michael Moore?
>
> Slashdot (www.slashdot.com) has a pointer to an article on how one  
> could
> find people with "subversive" Amazon wish lists.  The article, by Tom
> Owad,
> can be found at http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks, and gives a
> straightforward means to find such people from publicly available
> data using
> scripts.  Owad presents this article as the first in a planned weekly
> series
> "that will deal with security on the internet and practical steps you
> can take
> to protect your privacy".  Readers can register and post comments  
> on the
> site and/or contact him directly by email (his last name at
> applefritter.com)
>
> I've included the introductory paragraphs of the article below.  The
> remainder
> of the article includes a more detailed discussion, including scripts
> showing
> how to locate those individuals who have specific titles on their
> wish lists.
>
> Tony Wasserman
>
> Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon WishlistsSubmitted
> by Tom Owad on January 4, 2006 - 7:37pm.
> Vast deposits of personal information sit in databases across the
> internet. Terms used in phone conversations have become the grounds
> for federal investigation. Reputable organizations like the Catholic
> Worker, Greenpeace, and the Vegan Community Project, have come under
> scrutiny by FBI "counterterrorism" agents.
>
> "Data mining" of all that information and communication is at the
> heart of the furor over the recent disclosure of government snooping.
> "U.S. President George W. Bush and his aides have said his executive
> order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to
> monitoring international phone and e-mail communications linked to
> people with connections to al-Qaeda. What has not been acknowledged,
> according to the Times, is that NSA technicians combed large amounts
> of phone and Internet traffic seeking patterns pointing to terrorism
> suspects.
>
> "Some officials described the program as a large data mining
> operation, the Times said, and described it as much larger than the
> White House has acknowledged." (Reuters)
>
> Combining a data mining operation with the Patriot Act's power to
> access information makes it all too easy for the federal government
> to violate the Constitution's prohibition against unreasonable
> search. Ars Technica has an article, The new technology at the root
> of the NSA wiretap scandal, that describes the ease with which
> widespread wiretapping can now be implemented. It quotes Philip
> Zimmermann, the creator of the PGP encryption software:
>
> "A year after the CALEA [Communications Assistance for Law
> Enforcement Act] passed [in 1994], the FBI disclosed plans to require
> the phone companies to build into their infrastructure the capacity
> to simultaneously wiretap 1 percent of all phone calls in all major
> U.S. cities. This would represent more than a thousandfold increase
> over previous levels in the number of phones that could be
> wiretapped. In previous years, there were only about a thousand court-
> ordered wiretaps in the United States per year, at the federal,
> state, and local levels combined. It's hard to see how the government
> could even employ enough judges to sign enough wiretap orders to
> wiretap 1 percent of all our phone calls, much less hire enough
> federal agents to sit and listen to all that traffic in real time.
> The only plausible way of processing that amount of traffic is a
> massive Orwellian application of automated voice recognition
> technology to sift through it all, searching for interesting keywords
> or searching for a particular speaker's voice. If the government
> doesn't find the target in the first 1 percent sample, the wiretaps
> can be shifted over to a different 1 percent until the target is
> found, or until everyone's phone line has been checked for subversive
> traffic. The FBI said they need this capacity to plan for the future.
> This plan sparked such outrage that it was defeated in Congress. But
> the mere fact that the FBI even asked for these broad powers is
> revealing of their agenda."
>
> It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group
> of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then
> track them back to people. Most of us don't have access to the
> databases, software, or computing power of the NSA, FBI, and other
> government agencies. But an individual with access to the internet
> can still develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of
> thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available
> resources. Here's an example.
>
> There are many websites and databases that could be used for this
> project, but few things tell you as much about a person as the books
> he chooses to read. Isn't that why the Patriot Act specifically
> requires libraries to release information on who's reading what? For
> this reason, I chose to focus on the information contained in the
> popular Amazon wishlists.
>
> Amazon wishlists lets anyone bookmark books for later purchase. By
> default these lists are public and available to anybody who searches
> by name. If the wishlist creator specifies a shipping address,
> someone else can even purchase the book on Amazon and have it shipped
> directly as a gift. The wishlist creator's city and state are made
> public on the wishlist, but the street address remains private.
> Amazon's popularity has created a vast database of wishlists. No
> index of all wishlists is available, but it remains possible to view
> all wishlists by people of a particular first name. A recent search
> for people named Mark returned 124,887 publicly viewable wishlists.
>
> For an all inclusive search by name, you could compile a
> comprehensive list of first names and nicknames from the baby names
> databases available on the internet. Armed with this list, and by
> recording the search results for each first name, it is possible for
> you to retrieve the vast majority of public wishlists on Amazon.
>
> For the purposes of this exercise, only a single name was chosen – a
> common male name that returned over 260,000 wishlists. I'm not going
> to divulge what name was actually used. Let's pretend it was "Edgar,"
> in honor of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
>
> Before writing a script to download all the 260,000 "Edgar"
> wishlists, I confirmed that my actions would not violate Amazon's
> Conditions of Use. I also checked the robots.txt file which contains
> a list of directories Amazon requests not be traversed by scripts.
> User wishlists are not in this list, nor did the actions to be taken
> violate the conditions of use.  [more at www.applefritter.com/
> bannedbooks]
>
>
>
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