Faces, DNA, and relationships aren’t particularly new data points. The government has my passport photo, DNA (military record), and can check out my tax returns, Facebook, Twitter, etc to see who my wife, children, business partners, coworkers, and other family are.<p>The fundamental issue with their new database is that some analysis will be done on all of that data, along with criminal and public records, to characterize someone and store the result in the database. At that point, you’ve been classified and good luck getting out of whatever box they put you in (just see no fly lists for an example).<p>Now that you’re on some list, it snowballs. Every encounter with agents, every flight, every new relationship, any odd transaction will just make it worse and solidify how much of a threat/person of interest/terrorist/extremist you are.<p>Source: I’m a former intelligence analyst.
If the US has this, can you imagine what the Chinese database has?<p>It’s very probable that the Chinese have a database on <i>every person</i> in the world. Everything you ever posted, and who knows what else, all sitting on some server, lying in wait. It wouldn’t take much more than an Oracle DB on a single Dell server.<p>The purpose of this would be something akin to the Soviet “sexpionage” of the 60’s and the 70’s. It’s incredible blackmail material. It doesn’t need
to be used now, but as people grow older and move up the ranks of organizations, all of the naked
photos that were swiped from their iCloud account 17 years before can prove incredibly damaging.<p>EDIT: Singled out China as an example, but should have said most governments.
I post it a million times but I will post it again. Please visit <i>decidethefuture.org</i> and/or <i>fightforthefuture.org</i> and see what your local politicians stance on data privacy, surveillance, and privacy/data policy.<p>The best way to protect your privacy and your constitutional rights is to vote for privacy advocates.
Much like bills in government sessions, naming is everything: bad bills can have happy-sounding names and receive endless support, and so can government agencies.<p>“Homeland Security” is genius naming because you can justify almost anything with that name. They can always need more money “for security”. They can always be granted new powers “for security”. Hell, these ridiculous tariffs are “for national security” because literally nothing else justifies them.<p>And let’s not forget this is a relatively <i>new</i> government entity: it did not exist 20 years ago. It was created opportunistically (“never waste a crisis”) with full knowledge that it would be very hard to eliminate.
It didn’t before? I remember crossing the border from Canada to the US after 9/11 but before you had to have a passport (a driver’s license and birth certificate were sufficient) and I was asked a series of questions. The questions included a lot of family stuff, like “where does your father work?” but they also included “what is your girlfriend’s birthday,” which I found odd because I was dating a lot and didn’t have a steady girlfriend at the time. I’m not bragging here, but it took me three name/birthday combinations to guess the one the border agent had on his terminal screen.
I dunno, either the data will be too noisy to make any inferences OR they will focus on people who have no connections. But the big risk will be the false positive rate and those who get put on lists and denied travel, entry or jobs.
I don't want to make this political as I'm unaffiliated with any political party, but I notice a trend and have a theory.<p>When Republicans are shaping policy, they tend to target air travel.<p>The article states that the system gets false denials as much as 1 out of 25 times... 4% is a very high error rate. For DIA alone that would average out to almost ~6,700 false denials a day. And that's not accounting for people who have been miscategorized in the system by the threat detection algorithm. It's another level of worry and potential headache associated with air travel.<p>Before 9/11, you could arrive at an airport 20 minutes before your flight was supposed to take off and still make it. After 9/11, to get on a plane you had to let the government take a nude picture of you, get a dose of radiation, and expect security lines to take 2 hours or more.<p>The hassle of flying made the comparative cost of driving places less because there was so much hassle associated with it.<p>And that's the basis my theory, the government is trying to dissuade people from flying in favor of burning through oil by artificially increasing its cost. Not to mention, like always, lining the pockets of the contractors in what is likely another no-bid scenario.<p>When 9/11 happened, public resources were poured into buying a bunch of nude body scanners that nobody wanted, were unvetted for long-term safety, and were literally useless for many types of weapons. But the measures were successful at making flying a nightmare.<p>Now the goal is to pour public resources into broadening the scope of no-fly list and implement a broken computer vision system to figure out who to ground? And for what? Has there been an upswing in terrorists hijacking planes domestically lately that we're responding to?<p>To my knowledge there have been 0 incidents of air travel terrorism in the US since 9/11.<p>It seems like the Republicans just like to make air travel as miserable as possible to convince the average American to choose to road trip in the face of cheap and quick air travel to justify their oil interests.<p>And with people as irresponsible as the ones who put in the Rapiscan machines in charge of evaluating threat levels it seem like a recipe for disaster (unless you are a private prison owner).<p>Not to mention that with 2012's National Defense Authorization act, America was qualified as a war zone to justify its indefinite detention clause. I don't think anyone what's to live in an America where groups of politically active people could be hauled off as terrorist threats because they didn't want an oil pipeline polluting the waterways of the natives.<p>Go to the airport for vacation and end up indefinitely detained as a terrorist? That would frighten many people out of flying I'd imagine.<p>DHS is a bad joke that needs to go away.
This should be of no surprise.<p>Any data available from data brokers is available to gov agencies. It's being obtained via legal means, and therefore (afaik) is not covered by privacy law and other legal protections.
What. The. Hell.<p>This is getting out of hand. Bad enough bloody Facebook has entire continents of social graphs. Governments DEFINITELY DO NOT NEED THIS.<p>This is how you erode or work around legal protections for your citizenry. Once one country starts, others will implement the same, then the information sharing starts.<p>NO. Just NO. The cat is probably already well out of the bag, but the world really doesn't need this.