At NSA, Computers Sometimes Make the Policy Calls

John DeLong, the first-ever compliance director at the Pentagon’s spy agency, spends his days making sure analysts are not snooping on Americans.

U.S. law forbids the National Security Agency from intercepting communications between citizens. While privacy advocates argue that NSA databases nevertheless accumulate records on Americans, in fact, some of those systems are calling the shots to delete that information.

“There are times when we use technology to literally make legal and policy decisions,” said DeLong, 37, a lawyer whose additional math and physics degrees likely prepared him for the multifaceted task of policing code-breakers.

With an ever-increasing amount of messages to crack and data patterns to follow, agents have limited time to observe what he describes as “very specific procedures that govern their use and handling of that data.” So, machines sometimes patrol privacy.

“There are obviously some decisions that you can’t automate. You have to rely on a human for judgment. And we have lots of training” on foreign espionage authorizations, DeLong told Nextgov in an interview. “We have to make sure those authorizations pass from human to human from machine to machine very carefully.”

Those authorizations include minimization requirements, which tightly control any data obtained while targeting foreigners that identifies Americans. Other privacy measures include database audits and spot checking decisions about whom to pursue, according to intelligence officials.

A computer, for example, can be instructed to screen out certain types of information before it is passed on to the next stage of processing, DeLong explained. “In some cases, we literally have the legal and policy rules embedded in the technology such that the technology will only do those things,” he said.

Still, intelligence activities have broken the rules. As first reported by Wired in July, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged in a letter to warrantless wiretap critic Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that “on at least one occasion” the judicial branch determined “that some collection carried out pursuant to the [law’s] minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

When asked whether the incident occurred on his watch, DeLong said, “Root cause is always difficult to figure out, so I’m very hesitant to answer on timing. I will say very clearly, though, when there are incidents we follow the reporting path.”

He then deferred to ODNI, which coordinates the work of the U.S. intelligence community. “The government has remedied these concerns, and the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] has continued to approve the collection as consistent with the statute and reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” officials said in a statement.

DeLong added, “We’re nothing if we lose the confidence of the American people.”

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This article originally published at Nextgov
here

Read more: http://mashable.com/2012/08/20/nsa-computer-policy/

At NSA, Computers Sometimes Make the Policy Calls

Dev & Design, national security, NSA, politics, privacy, U.S., US & World

Tech Giants Urge Senate to Reform NSA Surveillance Powers

Tech giants, including Google, Facebook and Apple, have sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to reform the NSA surveillance programs.

The letter, sent on Thursday to top members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, implicitly endorses a specific bill, the USA Freedom Act, which would end the NSA program that collects U.S. phone call records.

Tech companies have been asking for permission to be more transparent in the months following the revelations fueled by Edward Snowden, but this time, they’re taking one extra step.

“Our companies believe that government surveillance practices should also be reformed to include substantial enhancements to privacy protections and appropriate oversight and accountability mechanisms for those programs,” the letter states.

The companies, which also include AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo, “applaud” the sponsors of the USA Freedom Act (.PDF), which would significantly reform the Patriot Act and NSA surveillance powers.

The bipartisan bill, introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the principal author of the Patriot Act, was introduced on Monday and lauded by civil liberties groups. The American Civil Liberties Union called it “real spying reform.”

Meanwhile, an opposing bill (.PDF), introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. The bill has been introduced to reform the NSA, but it allows the bulk collection of phone records to continue.

For Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a staunch supporter of curtailing NSA surveillance, Feinstein’s bill “would codify overbroad surveillance practices that infringe on the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans without making America any safer,” he said in a statement.”

Tech giants seem to have sided with the former, arguably more ambitious, reform bill — now it’s lawmakers’ turn.

ech Giants Letter in Support of NSA Surveillance Reform Bill USA Freedom Act

Image: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Read more: http://mashable.com/2013/10/31/tech-giants-letter-suports-usa-freedom-act/

Tech Giants Urge Senate to Reform NSA Surveillance Powers

AOL, apple, Facebook, google, Microsoft, NSA, politics, privacy, surveillance, U.S., US & World, Yahoo

Intel Fuels a Rebellion Around Your Data

The world’s largest chip maker wants to see a new kind of economy bloom around personal data.

Intel is a $53-billion-a-year company that enjoys a near monopoly on the computer chips that go into PCs. But when it comes to the data underlying big companies like Facebook and Google, it says it wants to “return power to the people.”

Intel Labs, the company’s R&D arm, is launching an initiative around what it calls the “data economy”—how consumers might capture more of the value of their personal information, like digital records of their their location or work history. To make this possible, Intel is funding hackathons to urge developers to explore novel uses of personal data. It has also paid for a rebellious-sounding website called We the Data, featuring raised fists and stories comparing Facebook to Exxon Mobil.

Intel’s effort to stir a debate around “your data” is just one example of how some companies—and society more broadly—are grappling with a basic economic asymmetry of the big data age: they’ve got the data, and we don’t.

Internet firms like Google and Amazon are concentrating valuable data about consumers at an unprecedented scale as people click around the Web. But regulations and social standards haven’t kept up with the technical and economic shift, creating a widening gap between data haves and have-nots.

“As consumers, we have no right to know what companies know about us. As companies, we have few restrictions on what we can do with this data,” says Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bit.ly, a social-media company in New York. “Even though people derive value, and companies derive value, it’s totally chaotic who has rights to what, and it’s making people uncomfortable.”

In February, for instance, legislators in California introduced the first U.S. law to give individuals a complete view into their online personas. The “Right to Know” bill would let citizens of the state demand a detailed report showing all the information about them that companies like LinkedIn or Google had stored, and whom they had shared it with.

That bill quickly got shelved under pressure from lobbyists for technology companies, who called it “unworkable” and financially damaging to Internet firms and said lawmakers don’t understand “how the Internet works.” Some of the data covered in the bill, like a computer’s IP address, or location, is so basic to communication between machines on the Internet that companies admitted they don’t even know where it ends up.

And that’s the wider dilemma: our personal data is inextricably tied to “big data”—those far larger data sets that now power many of the online services we use. If you don’t tell a navigation app where you are, it can’t tell you where to turn, or tell others there’s traffic ahead. One doesn’t work without the other. What’s more, the economic importance of products fueled with personal data is growing rapidly.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, as methods for basing transactions on a person’s digital records have spread from banks to retailers and other sectors, the financial value that companies derived from personal data in Europe was $72 billion in 2011. The consultants concluded that “personal data has become a new form of currency.”

Yet that doesn’t mean it’s a currency easily understood or traded on by individuals. Although a few startups have attempted to help individuals monetize their personal facts, the truth is that information about people’s identity and habits has financial value mostly in the aggregate. A single user’s value to Facebook, for instance, is only about $5 a year. Mason, the Bit.ly executive, says trying to put a value on one person’s data is like calculating the value of one unmatched shoe. “And here we are talking about sets of millions or billions of shoes,” she says. “I just don’t think that data plays by the economics of any goods we are familiar with.”

Some believe the market may have already found the right economic balance. “It seems like we have a working model where companies own our data and we’re okay with that because of the free stuff, personalization, and convenience we get in return,” says Gam Dias, CEO of First Retail, an e-commerce consulting company. “There’s not a lot I’m going to do with my extra data anyway. I already know who I am and what I want.”

Intel this year judged the questions swirling around personal data important enough to launch a “Data Economy Initiative,” a multiyear study whose goal is to explore new uses of technology that might let people benefit more directly, and in new ways, from their own data, says Ken Anderson, a cultural anthropologist who is in charge of the project.

Anderson, who once helped Apple develop the sliding application bar that appears on Mac computers (after studying how people organized their desks and stacked items on shelves), says Intel believes technology based on personal data may end up in the control of individuals, in much the same way that mainframe computers gave way to PCs. “It doesn’t matter what you look at in terms of technology. Usually, there is this move toward individualization,” he says.

Intel, which has started surveying consumer opinions, has also been supporting efforts like a competition in New York last fall in which developers wrote apps for the elderly and single mothers. It’s also underwriting the National Day of Civic Hacking, an event focused on new uses of municipal data being released by city governments, such as records of health inspections.

It’s too early to say just what kinds of products might result for Intel, Anderson says,. “When you talk about the data economy, it’s really something that doesn’t yet exist,” he says. “There are people who [are] trying to control a lot of your personal data. But that’s not an economy—that’s just profit for one company.”

Image via ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

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This article originally published at MIT Technology Review
here

Read more: http://mashable.com/2013/05/20/intel-data-economy/

Intel Fuels a Rebellion Around Your Data

Apps and Software, business, data sharing, Dev & Design, Intel, privacy