Homeland Security using “Babel X” to link SSNs to social media posts
Recently I learned about this effort by Homeland Security, Border Patrol, and other government agencies to track the online discussions of citizens & immigrants, and tie those discussions to their SSNs.
I suppose LifeLog (Facebook) was merely a stepping stone in this effort, which appears to be accelerating with the advent of low-cost AI.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bge3/dhs-uses-ai-tool-babel-x-babel-street-social-media-citizens-refugees
38 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadRecommend reading both the document and the Vice piece. Pretty damning considering the data being collected (mobile location data from ad networks via mobile apps).
It would be illegal for them to act on it. But I don’t think it’s illegal to correlate, particularly for public posts. (To be clear, I think this should be illegal.)
> various government agencies will always be tied to one party or another
No, they shouldn’t, haven’t generally been and are not over long time horizons.
I don't know if this law only affects business or the gov too, but the California Privacy Act says:
> The right to know about the personal information a business collects about them and how it is used and shared;
and also
> The right to limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information collected about them
but I'm pretty sure the gov will excuse themselves from laws made for businesses.
https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa
California laws don’t bind the feds.
Oddly, as bad as this practice is, it is likely one of the lower threats to privacy in US.
The legal term for this is “parallel construction”.
Even if the courts threw out cases that were built this way, it is hard to detect, and most cases don’t go to court.
Even if prosecutors behaved ethically, and didn’t pursue such cases, there are well-documented problems with organized crime infiltrating police departments, and then being difficult to bring to justice (e.g. LA’s deputy gangs have had control of a chunk of the LAPD for over 50 years).
The best solution is to ban the collection of the data in the first place.
No, they haven’t. Parallel construction is lying to the court about how you got your evidence. It’s never been court sanctioned to my knowledge.
In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and then passes it on to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer.[2] This practice gained support after the Supreme Court's 2009 Herring v. United States decision.[2]
in theory, it is, due to the blanket search provisions of the 4th Amendment. if you read the Federalist papers, it is absolutely what the 4th Amendment was created to prevent (although a far more automated approach than it ever envisioned).
in practice, the courts have weakened the 4th Amendment quite a bit, so it might be legal, technically.
So even if you don't post any wrongthink, the very act of typing it out, even without hitting "post" or "save", means its stored in some database ready for the regime to crush your social credit score, possibly ip to the FBI raid you.
I assume this applies to every "cloud" application on your desktop computer as well. Very little is offline unless you make a particular effort.
"Just FYI" If we are telling each other what to do and what we don't like, then I would say I don't like or agree with this attempt to tell someone else what to do over something so trivial and without some significant excuse or necessity.
> How do I make a link in a text submission?
> You can't. This is to prevent people from submitting a link with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.
Maybe the design of the site should reflect the policy, instead of ambiguity that results in polluting the entire first page with meta-commentary about HN policy instead of the actual post.
There is no comment field in submissions. Click submit and see what the three fields are, none of them are "comment".
The site's design and behavior reflects the policy.
I posted something just the other day myself and don't remember how the field was lebeled, but I sure wrote a comment in it, because it was just the obvious thing to do. (and the comment appeared in the form of a regular comment as though I had just added a comment like anyone else, not with the url.)
So I don't know how people actually even write those posts with text and a url, since when I tried, it didn't do that, but, I also cannot begin to guess why anyone has a problem with it. Why in the world is it wrong to say why you posted something, what aspect of it you found noteworthy, as you post it?
Yeah only a fool would take anything anyone writes on the internet as a sincere expression of belief. The internet, especially text heavy fora such as HN, Reddit, 4Chan, etc. are best used as a sounding board for thoughts and ideas you may have, but do not believe or have not yet determined the validity of. I love to take a hyperbolic stance of something i kind of think, or just an iconoclastic/heterodox stance and see how the discussion develops. This is immensely useful for clarifying my own thoughts and seeing how others think about a topic.
This field is optional to fill in, but I bet a lot of people fill it in anyways.
I left that field blank.
I fully deny any acct. It’s spam. Stolen cloud photos. Bot. Etc. (and to be honest I no longer have a fb, insta, etc., so it’s easy.)