Facebook is scaring me

[Magda Hassan]

In-Q-Tel was formed by the CIA in 1999 as a private, not-for-profit venture capital firm with the specific task of delivering technology to America's intelligence community. Publicly, In-Q-Tel markets itself as an innovative way to leverage the power of the private sector by identifying key emerging technologies and providing companies with the funding to bring those technologies to market. In reality, however, what In-Q-Tel represents is a dangerous blurring of the lines between the public and private sectors in a way that makes it difficult to tell where the American intelligence community ends and the IT sector begins.In-Q-Tel has generated a number of stories since its inception based on what can only be described as the "creepiness" factor of its investments in overtly Orwellian technologies.This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett presenting documented facts and cases on the CIA's privately owned venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, in which well-connected board members drawn from the private sector profit from the investments made with CIA funds that come from the taxpayer.

VIDEO HERE

[Ed Jewett]

In-Q-Tel was formed by the CIA in 1999 as a private, not-for-profit venture capital firm with the specific task of delivering technology to America's intelligence community. Publicly, In-Q-Tel markets itself as an innovative way to leverage the power of the private sector by identifying key emerging technologies and providing companies with the funding to bring those technologies to market. In reality, however, what In-Q-Tel represents is a dangerous blurring of the lines between the public and private sectors in a way that makes it difficult to tell where the American intelligence community ends and the IT sector begins.In-Q-Tel has generated a number of stories since its inception based on what can only be described as the "creepiness" factor of its investments in overtly Orwellian technologies.This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett presenting documented facts and cases on the CIA's privately owned venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, in which well-connected board members drawn from the private sector profit from the investments made with CIA funds that come from the taxpayer.

VIDEO HERE

Wonderful video there, Maggie, troubling as it is...

Thanks, to you, to James Corbett, to Sibel Edmonds... which only underlines the obvious trend that subscription-based news and information are the future. [Perhaps a sideline thread would be a discussion of which are worthy of our time, and how we might collaborate to jointly insure access to those deemed worthy.]

[Ed Jewett]

Appearing in near-simultaneity with the not-unexpected death of Steve Jobs [http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obit...story.html ] [ I wonder if my old iPod Classic has a built in GPS beacon*]:

Introducing Siri: DARPA's Ghost in Apple's Machine

October 5th, 2011So their eyes are growing hazy
cos they want to turn it on
so their minds are soft and lazy, well…
give em what they want
10,000 Maniacs Candy Everybody Wants
One of the stocks that I used to kick around in the 1990s was that of a now long dead company called General Magic. Back then, I looked into the company and learned that it was, in essence, divested from Apple in 1990. It was made up of former Apple employees and Apple held 10% of the company.
Apple has been thinking about the post PC era (that we're actually entering now, according to them) since the 1980s. Here's Apple's Knowledge Navigator concept from 1987:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscW...r_embedded

This wasn't going to happen anytime soon, so they spun it off into General Magic.
If you've seen Apple's Siri in action, that's the type of thing that General Magic wanted to do back in the 1990s. With the old Portico system, users called into the service, rather than the service running on the phone, as is the case with Siri. Here's an almost unwatchable promo for General Magic's Portico product (circa 1997):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG26dWNTi...r_embedded

If you're interested in Siri, definitely read Wired's, Bill and Andy's Excellent Adventure II from 1994. The point is that Apple and Apple alumni have been beating around this bush for a very long time.
Flash forward to what Apple unveiled yesterday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4D4kRbEd...r_embedded

Now, what's in a name?
Look closely at the name: Siri. What letters stand out?
See it yet?
S i R I.
SRI = Stanford Research Institute.
It turns out that Apple's Siri used to be SRI's Siri, and SRI's Siri is… Are you ready? A spinoff of DARPA's PAL (Perceptive Assistant that Learns) program, which SRI called CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF-KNFlOo...r_embedded




This is SRI's CALO information page:

SRI International is leading the development of new software that could revolutionize how computers support decision-makers.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under its Perceptive Assistant that Learns (PAL) program, has awarded SRI the first two phases of a five-year contract to develop an enduring personalized cognitive assistant. DARPA expects the PAL program to generate innovative ideas that result in new science, new and fundamental approaches to current problems, and new algorithms and tools, and to yield new technology of significant value to the military.
SRI has dubbed its new project CALO, for Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes. The name was inspired by the Latin word "calonis", which means "soldier's servant". The goal of the project is to create cognitive software systems, that is, systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.
The software, which will learn by interacting with and being advised by its users, will handle a broad range of interrelated decision-making tasks that have in the past been resistant to automation. It will have the capability to engage in and lead routine tasks, and to assist when the unexpected happens. To focus the research on real problems and to ensure the software meets requirements such as privacy, security, and trust, the CALO project researchers will themselves use the technology during its development.
SRI is leading the multidisciplinary CALO project team, and, beyond participating in the research program, is also responsible for overall project direction and management and the development of prototypes.

Here's more from Venture Beat, Shadowy Government Project Spins Off Siri to Help Direct Your Affairs:

Conspiracy theorists will love this one: A computerized assistant that can help you manage your day to day life, built atop an artificial intelligence platform developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the United States' internal military research group. Siri, the startup building the assistant, is today announcing $8.5 million in venture funding.
As befits its spookish origins, Siri isn't saying a great deal yet about what it will do. Co-founder Dag Kittlaus, who licensed technology from DARPA's CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes) project, calls it "a smarter, more personal interaction paradigm for the Internet." Unfortunately, that's about as specific as calling Google "a thing that finds stuff." Those who want a sneak peek at Siri will instead have to look to CALO.
So here's what we know about CALO: It's a concerted effort to take the first real step toward artificial intelligence, with five years of work and $200 million in funding to date. Rather than being immediately useful, it learns about the user over time, much like a real personal assistant would. As it learns, it becomes capable of making logical associations and initiating its own actions.

Siri, Apple's Implementation of DARPA Sponsored Artificial Intelligence Technology

People are going to pay a lot of money to have their asses tracked to within a couple of meters by a device running a civilian version of DARPA's soldier's servant software.
The most disturbing aspect of this is not what the iPhone 4s is going to be phoning home to Apple (which is unknown), or the invasion of The Complex into most aspects of our lives, but the fact that, in general, people would think that you were nuts for having these reservations at all. I mean, what could possibly be wrong with re-purposed DoD AI software running on a mass market consumer device that persistently reveals the user's location to the state?
Ah well, give em what they want.
Posted in Coincidence?, COINTELPRO, Covert Operations, Dictatorship, Economy,Elite, Rise of the Machines, Surveillance, Technology, War

[Ed Jewett]

* I was going to suggest that we have some kind of mechanism everyone would be required to wear... an IFF beanie... that transmitted in the background and in an ongoing manner the full array of self-labels, information consumption trends and tendencies, the results of psychological screening tests, one's tendencies or proclivities....

or, it appears, we could simply carry an android that would do it for us.

'mere C3PO...

[Peter Lemkin]

* I was going to suggest that we have some kind of mechanism everyone would be required to wear... an IFF beanie... that transmitted in the background and in an ongoing manner the full array of self-labels, information consumption trends and tendencies, the results of psychological screening tests, one's tendencies or proclivities....

or, it appears, we could simply carry an android that would do it for us.

'mere C3PO...

I believe there are a few experimental supermarkets that read your preferences [from past purchases and other information on you] in your store card with RFID chip in your wallet; as one walks down the isles a soft synthetic voice talks to you, making suggestions, telling you your favorite items are on sale, etc. I never get store cards, but if I even encountered such a store, I'd run out....but then there are those who have had microchip RFID implants in their bodies....becoming C3PO's themselves.

[Magda Hassan]

Facebook's Privacy Lie: Aussie Exposes New 'Tracking' Patent

By Asher Moses, Sydney Morning Herald05 October 11 acebook has been caught telling porkies by an Australian technologist whose revelations that the site tracks its 800 million users even when they are logged out have embroiled Facebook in a global public policy - and legal - nightmare.Facebook's assurances that "we have no interest in tracking people" have been laid bare by a new Facebook patent, dated this month, that describes a method "for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain".Nik Cubrilovic's blog post, which revealed that tracking cookies monitor Facebook users whenever they surf websites with a Facebook 'like' button, has led to political outrage in the US and Europe.An Illinois man has filed a lawsuit over the tracking on behalf of Facebook users in the US and he is seeking class action status.Facebook said certain cookies were tracking users in error and made several changes in response to Cubrilovic's revelations. However, it didn't stop tracking users altogether, maintaining that it needed the ability to track browsers after they logged out for safety, spam and performance purposes.In new posts over the long weekend, Cubrilovic published instructions on how to setup secure and private Facebook browsing. His latest post contains new revelations that indicate Facebook has not switched tracking off at all.Facebook said tracking cookies were only installed when users accessed Facebook.com but Cubrilovic found they were set by all sites that contained Facebook widgets.In fact one of the tracking cookies used by Facebook, called "datr", tracks users "even if the user had never been to the Facebook site, and even if they didn't click a 'like' or share' button", Cubrilovic wrote. The cookie was previously disabled following revelations in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year but has since returned.Cubrilovic is not convinced by Facebook's assurances that it does not use the cookies to track users."If you set a cookie on a users machine from one website, and then read that cookie from that persons machine from another website, that is tracking," he wrote.Facebook's assurances have been put further in doubt following the discovery of a Facebook patent filing on user tracking dated just days before it told the world it had "no interest in tracking people".The patent, "Communicating Information in a Social Network System about Activities from Another Domain", specifically refers to tracking users outside of Facebook.com.It describes maintaining a "profile" of each user as they move around the web and "logging the actions taken on the third-party website".A Facebook spokesman said the patent was not intended to track logged out users. The patent, on "careful reading", actually described a fundamental part of the Facebook platform - "creating social experiences across the web without logging into Facebook repeatedly or third party sites at all".It gave as an example its social plug-ins which mean, for instance, that Facebook users can see content friends have "liked" on a third-party site without having to log in to that website. Facebook said current functionality and future business plans shouldn't be inferred from its patent applications."Like many technology companies, we patent lots of ideas. Some of these ideas become products or features and some don't," Facebook said.In the US, a group of privacy advocates and consumer rights organisations sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission calling for a probe into Facebook.It came just days after two US congressman made similar calls, arguing in a letter that when users log out of Facebook they are under the impression that Facebook is no longer monitoring their activities and "this impression should be reality".The FTC has yet to say whether it will begin an investigation.Dutch MP Kees Verhoeven called in parliament for Facebook to be held more accountable after it had "been repeatedly linked to privacy violations". Other MPs echoed his remarks and called for changes to the law to address Facebook privacy.In Ireland, where Facebook has its European headquarters, the data protection commissioner is planning a "detailed audit" of Facebook's activities outside the US and Canada, the Financial Times reported.It comes on top of political outrage directed at Facebook in other countries including Britain, Germany and Japan.Last week, the Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim, said he was not going to investigate the Facebook tracking issue as the site had assured him it had rectified the matter. But Pilgrim has yet to comment on the revelations in Cubrilovic's latest blog post or the tracking systems outlined in Facebook's patent filing.Separately, the rollout of Facebook's new Timeline feature, designed to turn profiles into a chronological scrapbook of major events in the user's life, is being delayed by a trademark infringement lawsuit filed by Timelines.com.The site's other major change, "frictionless sharing", whereby user activities are published on their profiles without any prompting by the user, has also sparked controversy.The feature enables, for instance, users to automatically inform friends when they play a song on Spotify, but it has also led to more unfortunate disclosures such as one user inadvertently telling friends they visited a porn site.Cubrilovic - and many privacy groups - fear that Facebook could combine "frictionless sharing" with the data it gets by tracking users around the web, risking significant unintended disclosures."These changes in business practices give the company far greater ability to disclose the personal information of its users to its business partners than in the past," the privacy advocates wrote in their complaint letter to the FTC."Options for users to preserve the privacy standards they have established have become confusing, impractical and unfair."In announcing the new features, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg referred to "Zuck's law" - his belief that Facebook users double the amount of information they share on the site each year.

[Ed Jewett]

* I was going to suggest that we have some kind of mechanism everyone would be required to wear... an IFF beanie... that transmitted in the background and in an ongoing manner the full array of self-labels, information consumption trends and tendencies, the results of psychological screening tests, one's tendencies or proclivities....

or, it appears, we could simply carry an android that would do it for us.

'mere C3PO...

... a few experimental supermarkets ... then there are those who have had microchip RFID implants in their bodies....becoming C3PO's themselves.

I have read the stories about such stores; I think they fell into the "wave of the future" category then, but the future is arriving as we speak. At my most recent visit to the electrophysiologist at the big downtown famous clinic at the crossroads of modern technology and medical mecca-ville, I was told by the nurse at the clinic who specializes in and checks out the onboard Porsche in my chest -- my boss and cardiologist were also mailed copies of the article on the shielding of it to outside interference by remote attackers with microwave or other nefarious means -- that my new unit (arriving in about 18-24 months and which will be gifted to me when the battery on the old one wears out, along the re-placement of the second lead) will enable WiFi reading and tracking anywhere on the globe by satellite.
:jawdrop::moon:

[Ed Jewett]

• Paper: "Detecting Emergent Conflicts Through Web Mining and Visualization." (PDF)
  

Posted by Shlok Vaidya on Friday, 07 October 2011 at 08:50 AM | Permalink

The paper has five authors, all from the Swedish Defense Research Agency...

[Albert Doyle]

So if you go to a JFK conspiracy site does the Facebook technology send a message out saying "Joe is reading material on how the CIA killed president Kennedy"? Or "Joe is reading on the ever-increasing privacy-invading police state software at Facebook"?

[Magda Hassan]

Facebook's Hotel California: Cross-Site Tracking and the Potential Impact on Digital Privacy Legislation

Tracking of Logged Out Users

For its 800 millions users, logging out of Facebook is not something done idly. Closing the Facebook tab won't do it. Closing your browser won't do it unless you've adjusted the settings in your browser to clear cookies upon closing. And Facebook has buried the log-out button so that it isn't apparent from your Facebook main page or profile page. This doesn't mean that logging out of Facebook is difficult; it's not. But this does indicate that when someone logs out of Facebook, they are doing so purposefully. They aren't just stepping outside of Facebook; they're closing the door behind them.
On September 25th, 2011, Nik Cubrilovic, a hacker and writer, published a blog post1 that showed that a particular Facebook session cookie wasn't being deleted after a user logged out. He noted that the session cookie included your Facebook user id number, which would presumably facilitate Facebook associating any data they collected about your browsing the web with your Facebook account. Cubrilovic's review showed that, based on what the cookies were transmitting, Facebook could easily connect some of your browsing habits to your unique Facebook account.
This set off a storm of media coverage, but much of it lacked a detailed analysis of what Facebook is actually tracking and an understanding of how this could influence pending privacy legislation in Congress.

What Does Facebook Really Track?

Facebook sets two types of cookies: session cookies and tracking cookies.

• Session cookies are set when you log into Facebook and they include data like your unique Facebook user ID. They are directly associated with your Facebook account. When you log out of Facebook, the session cookies are supposed to be deleted.
  
• Tracking cookies - also known as persistent cookies - don't expire when you leave your Facebook account. Facebook sets one tracking cookie known as 'datr' when you visit Facebook.com, regardless of whether or not you actually have an account. This cookie sends data back to Facebook every time you make a request of Facebook.com, such as when you load a page with an embedded Facebook 'like' button. This tracking takes place regardless of whether you ever interact with a Facebook 'like' button. In effect, Facebook is getting details of where you go on the Internet.
  

When you leave Facebook without logging out and then browse the web, you have both tracking cookies and session cookies. Under those circumstances, Facebook knows whenever you load a page with embedded content from Facebook (like a Facebook 'like' button) and also can easily connect that data back to your individual Facebook profile.
Based on Cubrilovic's recent findings, there was also a period of time when you kept a session cookie after logging out of Facebook, allowing Facebook to easily associate your web browsing history and your Facebook account. Facebook says they've addressed this issue, and that now all session cookies are deleted at log out.
But there have been other concerns around Facebook tracking, including an issue that has surfaced three times in the last year. Dutch doctoral candidate Arnold Rosendaal, independent security researcher Ashkan Soltani, and Stanford doctoral candidate and law student Jonathan Mayer have each discovered instances in which Facebook was setting tracking cookies on browsers of people when they visited sites other than Facebook.com. These tracking cookies were being set when individuals visited certain Facebook Connect sites, like CBSSports. As a result, people who never interacted with a Facebook.com widget, and who never visited Facebook.com, were still facing tracking by Facebook cookies.
But there's yet another layer to this, a layer often glossed over by mainstream coverage of this issue: Facebook can track web browsing history without cookies. Facebook is able to collect data about your browser including your IP address and a range of facts about your browser without ever installing a cookie. They can use this data to build a record of every time you load a page with embedded Facebook content. They keep this data for 90 days and then presumably discard or otherwise anonymize it. That's a far cry from being able to shield one's reading habits from Facebook.

Facebook's Response

For its part, Facebook admits they collected the data through the accidental setting of tracking cookies and the failure to delete session cookies upon log out - but says these were oversights. They say that the issues are now resolved. They expanded their help section and sent us this statement:

Facebook uses cookies to provide customized content, measure the performance of our products, and protect individual users and our service. We do not track people across the Web to sell that information or use it to target advertisements. In recent instances, when we were made aware that certain cookies were sending more information to us than we had intended, we fixed our cookie management system immediately.
Our intentions stand in stark contrast to the many ad networks and data brokers that deliberately and, in many cases, surreptitiously track people to create profiles of their behavior, sell that content to the highest bidder, or use that content to target ads on sites across the Internet.

The Trust Gap

For users concerned about privacy, this statement is small consolation. It's clear that Facebook does extensive cross-domain tracking, with two types of cookies and even without. With this data, Facebook could create a detailed portrait of how you use the Internet: what sites you visit, how frequently you load them, what time of day you like to access them. This could point to more than your shopping habits it could provide a candid window into health concerns, political interests, reading habits, sexual preferences, religious affiliations, and much more.
Facebook insists they aren't misusing the data they are collecting. The question is then: do we as Internet users trust Facebook? Do we trust them not to connect our data with our Facebook profiles, sell it to marketers, or provide it to the government upon request? If Facebook's business model becomes less profitable in the coming years, do we trust them to continue to not connect tracking data to profiles? If the government brings pressure to bear on Facebook, do we trust Facebook to stand with users and safeguard the data they've collected? And, do we believe that Facebook isn't actually connecting browsing data to profiles now, given their history of mistakes when it comes to tracking and the clear market incentive they would derive from that sort of connection?
This is the "trust gap"- the space between what Facebook promises they are doing with the data they are collecting and what we as Facebook users can reasonably trust them to do. And, when it comes to safeguarding the sensitive reading habits of millions of users, the trust gap is pretty wide.

Could Privacy Snafus Spur Privacy Legislation?

If you are uneasy with Facebook's cross-domain tracking, you aren't alone. This has led to acall from lawmakers as well as privacy advocates to have the FTC investigate whether Facebook deceived users by tracking logged-out users. And a group of 6 Facebook users has filed suitagainst Facebook over this issue.
This newest privacy snafu could prod legislators into moving on one of the many online privacy bills that have been introduced this year. Users' unease with the quickly-evolving technical capabilities of companies to track users, combined with the abstruse ways in which that data can be collected (from social widgets to super cookies to fingerprinting), has resulted in a growing user demand to have Congress provide legal safeguards for individual privacy when using the Internet.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook hopes that its brand of data collection through like' buttons won't be subject to federal regulation. According to AdAge, Facebook sent an "army of lawyers" to Washington to convince Senators McCain and Kerry to carve out exceptions to their recently introduced privacy bill so that Facebook could track their users via social widgets on other sites (dubbed the "Facebook loophole"). But while Kerry and McCain may have acquiesced to Facebook's requests, Senator Rockefeller did not. He introduced legislation that would empower the FTC to create rules around how best to protect users online from pervasive online tracking by third parties.
Facebook seems keen to influence future legislation on these issues. They recently filed paperwork to form a political action committee that will be "supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."
We hope that these efforts to influence politicians won't come at the cost of strong protections for user privacy on the Internet. As the situation currently stands, the resources available to governments and corporations to track users across the Internet far outstrip the resources of the average user to fend off such tracking. And from all appearances, self-regulation by industry is failing.

What You Can Do

If you find yourself creeped-out by being tracked by Facebook on non-Facebook sites, then you have a few options to protect yourself and voice your concerns.

• Install Firefox addons like Ghostery, ShareMeNot, Abine's Taco, and/or AdBlockPlus to limit online tracking. None of these is perfect and each works a little different; check outthis guide for a discussion. Also consider installing the Priv3 Firefox extension, which is still in beta.
  
• Use private browsing mode.
  
• Adjust the settings in your browser to delete all cookies upon closing. Clear your cookies when leaving a social networking site, and log out of Facebook before browsing the web. You should consider having one browser strictly for logging into your Facebook account and one browser for the rest of your web usage.
  
• Send a quick complaint to the Federal Trade Commission via their online web complaint form. The FTC uses its complaint form to gauge what issues concern consumers and may launch investigations if there is sufficient user interest.
  
• Support privacy legislation like the Rockefeller Do Not Track bill, which will give users a voice when it comes to online tracking.
  

[LIST=|INDENT=-3]
[*]1.According to his blog, Cubrilovic says he's been trying to inform Facebook of these issues since November 14, 2010
[/LIST]https://www.eff.org/2011/october/faceboo...al-privacy