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Data Brokers & Buyers Anger Congress
By Amanda Beck
Sun Jun 25, 3:51 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Almost every piece of personal information that Americans try to keep secret -- including bank account statements, e-mail messages and telephone records -- is semi-public and available for sale.

That was the lesson Congress learned over the last week during a series of hearings aimed at exposing peddlers of personal data, from whom banks, car dealers, jealous lovers and even some law enforcement officers have covertly purchased information to use as they wish.

U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee members also hoped the hearings would free up two measures to outlaw the practice that were mysteriously pulled from the House floor last month, apparently due to concerns in the U.S. intelligence community.



"We had the impression that there were no secrets any more. Now we know that for sure," said Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican and chairman of the panel's oversight subcommittee.

He described a multimillion dollar industry that sells cell phone records for $200, Social Security information for $60 and a student's university class schedule for $80.

Most often, the customers are banks or financial institutions attempting to locate absconding debtors. But law enforcement officers -- including those in the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and Austin Police Department -- have "used the services on occasion".

The problem has been that data brokers often have obtained information by deception, and they did not monitor to whom they were selling or how the data was used, lawmakers said.

"Such information, for example, could allow a stalker to find a victim or a threatening husband to find a spouse," said Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat who lamented that for $300 buyers can purchase the location of a cell phone that a person carries daily.

Witnesses also testified that in one instance an undercover Los Angeles police officer was killed after drug dealers used a data broker to retrieve his beeper information.

REFUSING TO TESTIFY

The committee subpoenaed representatives from 11 companies that use the Internet and phone calls to obtain, market, and sell personal data, but they refused to talk

All invoked their constitutional right to not incriminate themselves when asked whether they sold "personal, non-public information" that had been obtained by lying or impersonating someone.

"What delicious irony," said Rep. Joe Barton, chairman of the full committee and a Texas Republican. "People who cheat and lie for the purpose of making money are now complaining that they cannot cheat and lie in private."

The committee focused on the technique of pretexting, in which a caller contacts a phone company, utility or government agency under the pretense of being someone else, perhaps the manager of a branch office or the actual customer.

Some lawmakers shook their heads as former data broker James Rapp explained how easily and quickly he could obtain and sell a bank password or credit card record of committee members.

Rapp said by offering a few pieces of personal information, such as a person's name and address, pretexters con a customer service representative into revealing other information. After a few inquiries, they can get the Social Security number, the key to a trove of other sensitive data.

"There was nowhere you could run or hide that I couldn't track you down," said Rapp, who closed his data brokerage in 1999 under pressure from Denver police.

The pending legislation was developed because it is unclear if data brokers violate specific fraud or identity theft laws.

However, Republicans and Democrats on the committee said they suspected House leaders halted the bills because of their potential implications on terrorism investigations, such as accessing phone records from Verizon Communications and other companies without subpoenas.

Lawmakers also grilled law enforcement officials about using data brokers, questioning whether it was a method to circumvent a subpoena or cut the time required to receive a company's response.

The officers said using data brokers was not standard practices and those who obtained the information were new or believed the information was obtained legitimately. They also denied it was a problem to wait sometimes days or weeks to receive information through a warrant.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/privacy_dc ... etc ...

[Ya-ta Boy]

[desultude]

[mindmetoo]

We give up privacy for the sake of convenience. We use a credit card instead of cash. We use a cell phone instead of pay phones. I'm not so sure this is a problem. The data is there. They company that provides me the convenience is free to mine it.

[fiveeagles]

[desultude]

[igotthisguitar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining

[igotthisguitar]

Pentagon Sets Its Sights On Social Networking Websites
09 June 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Paul Marks

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025556 ... etc ...

Web Links
Electronic Frontier Foundation campaign against wiretaps
Disruptive Technologies Office, Wikipedia
MySpace

Enlarge image
Who knows who "I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally. However, the White House insists that the terrorist threat makes existing wire-tapping legislation out of date and is urging Congress not to investigate the NSA's action.

Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay.

"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resum�. People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days," says Callas.

Other data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions we make, such as buying a house.

�You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resum�Right now this is difficult to do because today's web is stuffed with data in incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C hopes that one day every website will use RDF to give each type of data a unique, predefined, unambiguous tag.

"RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people," says David de Roure at the University of Southampton in the UK, who is an adviser to W3C. "It means that you will be able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform calculations on the data it contains." In a health record, for instance, a heart attack will have the same semantic tag as its more technical description, a myocardial infarction. Previously, they would have looked like separate medical conditions. Each piece of numerical data, such as the rate of inflation or the number of people killed on the roads, will also get a tag.

The advantages for scientists, for instance, could be huge: they will have unprecedented access to each other's experimental datasets and will be able to perform their own analyses on them. Searching for products such as holidays will become easier as price and availability dates will have smart tags, allowing powerful searches across hundreds of sites.

On the downside, this ease of use will also make prying into people's lives a breeze. No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.

That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.

What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. According to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA's role is to spend NSA money on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community". Chief among ARDA's aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects - some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month.

The ever-growing online social networks are part of the flood of internet information that could be mined: some of the top sites like MySpace now have more than 80 million members (see Graph).

The research ARDA funded was designed to see if the semantic web could be easily used to connect people. The research team chose to address a subject close to their academic hearts: detecting conflicts of interest in scientific peer review. Friends cannot peer review each other's research papers, nor can people who have previously co-authored work together.

So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of computer science papers.

Joshi says their system found conflicts between potential reviewers and authors pitching papers for an internet conference. "It certainly made relationship finding between people much easier," Joshi says. "It picked up softer [non-obvious] conflicts we would not have seen before."

The technology will work in exactly the same way for intelligence and national security agencies and for financial dealings, such as detecting insider trading, the authors say. Linking "who knows who" with purchasing or bank records could highlight groups of terrorists, money launderers or blacklisted groups, says Sheth.

The NSA recently changed ARDA's name to the Disruptive Technology Office. The DTO's interest in online social network analysis echoes the Pentagon's controversial post 9/11 Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative. That programme, designed to collect, track and analyse online data trails, was suspended after a public furore over privacy in 2002. But elements of the TIA were incorporated into the Pentagon's classified programme in the September 2003 Defense Appropriations Act.

Privacy groups worry that "automated intelligence profiling" could sully people's reputations or even lead to miscarriages of justice - especially since the data from social networking sites may often be inaccurate, untrue or incomplete, De Roure warns.

But Tim Finin, a colleague of Joshi's, thinks the spread of such technology is unstoppable. "Information is getting easier to merge, fuse and draw inferences from. There is money to be made and control to be gained in doing so. And I don't see much that will stop it," he says.

Callas thinks people have to wise up to how much information about themselves they should divulge on public websites. It may sound obvious, he says, but being discreet is a big part of maintaining privacy.

Time, perhaps, to hit the delete button.

From issue 2555 of New Scientist magazine, 09 June 2006, page 30