[Noisebridge-discuss] Massive new NSA spying project projected for 2013

jim jim at systemateka.com
Sat Mar 17 21:05:49 UTC 2012



    Thanks for the link. 

    Question: how can my refrigerator give NSA information 
about me? (It's old and maybe PG&E put in a smart meter, 
but our unit is on a sub-panel controlled by the main 
distribution panel--difficult to see how even refrig use 
would properly be reflected. 
    People who buy new refrigerators probably have MCUs in 
them, but even so, how can refrig control or energy 
harvesting circuits reflect much info? 

    Software is the critical element to the use of data. 
There's a new-ish term, "big data", that refers to the 
analysis of large amounts of unstructured data (such as 
mobile phone, twitter, other social media, email...). 
The software tools for big data are in their infancy. 
Palantir makes a software suite for government and for 
financial analysis (I believe wrt "big data", certainly 
wrt large, complex data sets. 

http://www.palantir.com/government 

http://www.palantir.com/ 


    Hadoop is an open source tool that addresses big data. 
It requires a number of tools, some of which present new, 
head-bending concepts, which will take a lot of years for 
enough data analysts to learn to use effectively. 

http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/ 

http://hadoop.apache.org/ 


    The approach to self-defense, I suppose, is to stay 
low and/or be very plain speaking (data-ing), along the 
lines of open source thinking. 
    I suspect most of us are fairly safe, given the 
existing (perceived) priorities. 

    My primary fear is that of mistakes: "Our software 
says that people who eat both ice cream and pizza in a 
single day and have purchased black pants within the 
last two year period and are not members of the Sierra 
Club and have no specific religious affiliation and 
vote for democratic party politicians and are frequent 
but not regular patrons of health food stores and are 
between 24 and 32 or between 58 and 69 years of age... 
have a 30% likelihood of ... AND YOU'RE ONE OF THEM AND 
YOU WERE AT THE AIRPORT ON FRIDAY AND IN BOSTON THERE 
WAS... AND YOU GOTTA COME WITH US NOW. AND NO, YOU 
CAN'T MAKE A PHONE CALL OR GET YOUR COAT. 
    (Later they discover that ice cream and pizza was 
a negative rather than a positivea indicator.) 



On Sat, 2012-03-17 at 13:27 -0700, Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote:
> How to protect oneself? How will you defend your rights when this
> comes online? Even TOR will no longer be safe with this amount of
> resources at their disposal :(
> 
> http://www.examiner.com/city-buzz-in-charlotte/nsa-2-billion-utah-based-facility-can-process-yottabytes-of-information
> 
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