unnervingly accurate when
it suggests people you mightknow whom you’re not already Facebook friends with. One of Facebook’s most successful
advertising programs involves showing ads not just to people who Like a particular
page or product, but to their friends and to friends of their friends.
FINDING US BY WHAT WE DO
Once you have collected data on everyone, you can search for individuals based on
their behavior. Maybe you want to find everyone who frequents a certain gay bar, or
reads about a particular topic, or has a particular political belief. Corporations
do this regularly, using masssurveillance data to find potential customers with particular
characteristics, or looking for people to hire by searching for people who have published
on a particular topic.
One can search for things other than names and other personal identifiers like identification
numbers, phone numbers, and so on. Google, for example, searches all of your Gmail
and uses keywords it finds to more intimately understand you, for advertising purposes.
The NSA does something similar: what it calls “about” searches. Basically, it searches
the contents of everyone’s communications for a particular name or word—or maybe a
phrase. So in addition to examining Alice’s data and the data of everyone within two
or three hops of her, it can search everyone else—the entire database of communications—for
mentions of her name. Or if it doesn’t know a name, but knows the name of a particular
location or project, or a code name that someone has used, it can search on that.
For example, the NSA targets people who search for information on popular Internet
privacy and anonymity tools.
We don’t know the details, but the NSA chains together hops based on any connection,
not just phone connections. This could include being in the same location as a target,
having the same calling pattern, and so on. These types of searches are made possible
by having access to everyone’s data.
You can use mass surveillance to find individuals. If you know that a particular person
was at a specific restaurant one evening, a train station three days later in the
afternoon, and a hydroelectric plant the next morning, you can query a database of
everyone’s cell phone locations, and anyone who fits those characteristics will pop
up.
You can also search for anomalous behavior. Here are four examples of how the NSA
uses cell phone data.
1.The NSA uses cell phone location information to track people whose movements intersect.
For example, assume that the NSA is interested in Alice. If Bob is at the same restaurant
as Alice one evening, and then at the same coffee shop as Alice a week later, and
at the same airport as Alice a month later, the system will flag Bob as a potential
associate of Alice’s, even if the two have never communicated electronically.
2.The NSA tracks the locations of phones that are carried around by US spies overseas.
Then it determines whether there are any other cell phones that follow the agents’
phones around. Basically, the NSA checks whether anyone is tailing those agents.
3.The NSA has a program where it trawls through cell phone metadata to spot phones
that are turned on, used for a while, and then turned off and never used again. And
it uses the phones’ usage patterns to chain them together. This technique is employed
to find “burner” phones used by people who wish to avoid detection.
4.The NSA collects data on people who turn their phones off, and for how long. It
then collects the locations of those people when they turned their phones off, and
looks for others nearby who also turned their phones off for a similar period of time.
In other words, it looks for secret meetings.
I’ve already discussed the government of Ukraine using cell phone location data to
find everybody who attended an antigovernment demonstration, and the Michigan police
it suggests people you mightknow whom you’re not already Facebook friends with. One of Facebook’s most successful
advertising programs involves showing ads not just to people who Like a particular
page or product, but to their friends and to friends of their friends.
FINDING US BY WHAT WE DO
Once you have collected data on everyone, you can search for individuals based on
their behavior. Maybe you want to find everyone who frequents a certain gay bar, or
reads about a particular topic, or has a particular political belief. Corporations
do this regularly, using masssurveillance data to find potential customers with particular
characteristics, or looking for people to hire by searching for people who have published
on a particular topic.
One can search for things other than names and other personal identifiers like identification
numbers, phone numbers, and so on. Google, for example, searches all of your Gmail
and uses keywords it finds to more intimately understand you, for advertising purposes.
The NSA does something similar: what it calls “about” searches. Basically, it searches
the contents of everyone’s communications for a particular name or word—or maybe a
phrase. So in addition to examining Alice’s data and the data of everyone within two
or three hops of her, it can search everyone else—the entire database of communications—for
mentions of her name. Or if it doesn’t know a name, but knows the name of a particular
location or project, or a code name that someone has used, it can search on that.
For example, the NSA targets people who search for information on popular Internet
privacy and anonymity tools.
We don’t know the details, but the NSA chains together hops based on any connection,
not just phone connections. This could include being in the same location as a target,
having the same calling pattern, and so on. These types of searches are made possible
by having access to everyone’s data.
You can use mass surveillance to find individuals. If you know that a particular person
was at a specific restaurant one evening, a train station three days later in the
afternoon, and a hydroelectric plant the next morning, you can query a database of
everyone’s cell phone locations, and anyone who fits those characteristics will pop
up.
You can also search for anomalous behavior. Here are four examples of how the NSA
uses cell phone data.
1.The NSA uses cell phone location information to track people whose movements intersect.
For example, assume that the NSA is interested in Alice. If Bob is at the same restaurant
as Alice one evening, and then at the same coffee shop as Alice a week later, and
at the same airport as Alice a month later, the system will flag Bob as a potential
associate of Alice’s, even if the two have never communicated electronically.
2.The NSA tracks the locations of phones that are carried around by US spies overseas.
Then it determines whether there are any other cell phones that follow the agents’
phones around. Basically, the NSA checks whether anyone is tailing those agents.
3.The NSA has a program where it trawls through cell phone metadata to spot phones
that are turned on, used for a while, and then turned off and never used again. And
it uses the phones’ usage patterns to chain them together. This technique is employed
to find “burner” phones used by people who wish to avoid detection.
4.The NSA collects data on people who turn their phones off, and for how long. It
then collects the locations of those people when they turned their phones off, and
looks for others nearby who also turned their phones off for a similar period of time.
In other words, it looks for secret meetings.
I’ve already discussed the government of Ukraine using cell phone location data to
find everybody who attended an antigovernment demonstration, and the Michigan police
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