*32C3 preroll music*
M.C.: Hey! So, can you hear me OK? Yeah.
I am M.C. and I work on Transparency Toolkit along with Brennan Novak
and Kevin Gallagher. Basically, what we try to do is “Watch the Watchers”.
Back in May we released a database of over 27.000 people in the Intelligence
Community called ICWATCH. And this is people who are talking about their work on
classified programs on the public internet. So we collected it using
search terms like the code words mentioned in the Snowden documents.
And today we’re releasing an update to ICWATCH
doubling the data in the database.
*applause*
And that’s already vive, if anyone wants to look at it.
For the people who aren’t familiar with this project and the sorts of things
available on the research methods I’d like to go through an interesting example of
research things that can be found in this database.
So this is Lauren Russell, and she works at L-3, a major intelligence contractor.
But she started her career as an army interrogator in Iraq. She says that
the information that she collected was used to capture dozens of people.
But part of her job was also to assure safe and humane treatment of hundreds
of detainees. So that’s good at least. But then, a few years after that, she went and
worked for a different company called Exelis in Afghanistan. And this job
was quite different. It involved finding people to kill. So she says as part
of this work that she “utilized F3EA methodology to conduct analysis on raw and
fused HUMINT, SIGINT, and COMINT helping to create 125 Targeting Support Packets
then nominated to the Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL) for kinetic targeting.”
So there’s a lot of not very obvious terms and gibberish there. And this is a pretty
common problem by going through these résumés. So I want to break down how you
would interpret that sentence. “Signals Intelligence” is what the NSA does.
It’s collecting data from intercepted communications. COMINT – Communications
Intelligence – is specifically Signals Intelligence from communication data.
So what the NSA does when they read your email.
HUMINT, Human Intelligence is Intelligence on human sources.
So things like data gain from informers or from torture.
The “direct priority of XLES” is a list of people the US military and its allies are
trying to kill and capture in Afghanistan.
F3EA stands for “Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit and Analyze”. It’s a rapid
intelligence collection and analysis methodology used for targeting. And
we recently found out in the Drone Papers that this is often used for
drone targeting. And “Kinetic Targeting” simply means attacking a moving target.
So looking at her profile again: she says that she “F3EA methodology
to conduct analysis on raw and fused HUMINT, SIGINT and COMINT helping to
create 125 Targeting Support Packets then nominated to the direct priority
of XLES for conduct targeting.” Basically what she means is that based on
intercepted communications and information from human sources, possibly gained under
the rest from torture she is deciding who should be killed and captured.
The Intelligence Community has long had an attitude of “Collect It All”.
And General [Keith B.] Alexander started trying to collect all the data
that they could from every source. One of the first projects to this end
was something called Real Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG). It’s a master project to
store, combine, search and analyze data from many different sources at once.
Everything from intercepted communications to data from drones to data from
interrogations to even mundane things like traffic patterns and the prize of potatoes.
They started this program in 2005. The initial version was built by SAIC
for use in Iraq. And these days it’s mostly used in Afghanistan.
It searches the US soil because according to documents published in “Der SPIEGEL”
last year Germany is the 3rd largest contributor to RT-RG. This source
of collection analysis tools are used for some programs that you might have
heard of too, like CoTraveller – the program the NSA has to figure who is
going places with who else. And there is a specific analytic tool. This part of
RT-RG called SIDEKICK that uses relative velocities to calculate this from any
different data sources, so that they can calculate that for people across networks.
Unfortunately, this is really computationally intensive because they
need to pre-compute all of the travel behaviour for all the pairs of selectors.
But it’s feasible for them to do computationally intensive things the time
that it’s built because it’s built on Hadoop and accumulo for distributed data
processing and storage. So they’re quite serious about this. The goals for RT-RG
are quite lofty. One of the creators, in an interview with “Defence News” described
their aim is being able to use intercepted communications and integrate it with
signals with geolocation. So that they can instantly find people and target them.
Another counter-terrorism official told the Wall Street Journal that RT-RG
literally allows them to predict the future. Decorrelation means it’s the
strongest correlation tool ever. So their goals of this seem to be two-fold: First
of all to be able to kill or smite any potential enemies. And 2nd one to be
omniscient. To know everything that’s happening at once. And to correlate it and
use that to predict what will happen in the future. And these goals sound a little bit beyond
what you would expect from someone who is trying to simply protect people or
stop terrorism. It sounds more like they’re trying to become some sort
of God. Who by collecting and analyzing everything know everything that’s
happening everywhere and can just smite any enemies from above. Instantly.
But the thing is they are'nt a God. There are people working on these and they're
normal people. And they’ve crazy resources and they intercept
a lot of data. But they also use data that’s freely available to anyone for
a lot of their work. Open Source Intelligence. This is a pamphlet from
a startup called ZeroFox that uses data from Social Media to track ISIS.
And tools like this are quite common. There’s another tool called “LM Wisdom”
that’s made by Lockheed Martin. And they have a wonderful promotion video
on their website explaining exactly how it works – that I’d like to play.
*with lowered voice:* Hopefully this’ll work…
*audio/video starts* Female Narrator: Social Media content has the power
to incite organized movements and sway political outcomes.
Person in Video: “It’s an opposition terrorist organization in Iran.”
Female Narrator: Monitoring and analyzing the massive and rapidly changing
open source intelligence data, or OSINT, and turning it into actionable intelligence
for decision-makers is an imperative. Lockheed Martin’s Wisdom software suite
offers an advanced capability to collect, manage and analyze vast amounts
of open source data. Enabling analysts to understand, measure and anticipate
real-world advance through Social Media. Person in Video: “Think of Wisdom as your
eyes and ears on the web. Wisdom is that tool that would allow it to do this
at scale!” Female Narrator: Wisdom’s advanced
Big Data collection capability and data store automatically identify and harvest
online Social Networking data of operational interest. As well as
socio-cultural data from standard online open sources like newspaper feeds and
structured databases. Wisdom’s high- performance analytic algorithms analyze
the content in near realtime distinguishing noise from high-value information.
Capturing trends, sentiment and influence; turning open source data into predictive,
actionable intelligence. *audio/video stops*
M.C.: Yeah, so… *applause*
…that’s what they’re doing. And they’re not just using this to target terrorists.
It was recently revealed that they are helping Walmart use this to find employees
that are organizing for better working conditions and find the main organizers
and fire them. Using data from Social Media.
So it’s used for Corporate purposes as well. And LM Wisdom wasn’t even made
for surveillance in the first place. I tracked down one of the people
who created it. And at that time he worked for General Electric and was hoping to
make a… to help NBC make tools so that they can figure out which sites
to partner with to make their videos go viral. So it’s not just governments that
are using Open Source Intelligence because there’s no barriers to access it and
there’s many applications. There’s even many people search databases that
have information like people’s address, and phone number, and relatives,
and how old they are. And these include many, many people. Probably everyone
in the US. And they’re used by many people for all sorts of purposes from private
detectives to people that are selling advertisements. If this data is available
already and it’s used for everything from figuring out who to kill to stopping unions
from organizing to trying to sell things to people – why can’t we use it to
understand surveillance programs, too? Why can’t we use it to understand human
rights abuses. Why not use it for accountability? So we started to build
tools to do this and in the near future we’d like to make it possible for anyone
to make something like ICWATCH or other databases in less than a day and without
programming. Long-term goal is to build software similar to what the Intelligence
Community has. Things similar to LM-Wisdom, things similar to Real Time Regional Gateway.
So that people can collect all this information in one place and analyze it.
I’d like to show a demo of some of the tools that we’ve been working on. It’s
possible to just – this won’t work at all but we’ll see. So this is Harvester. It’s
a tool for collecting data from online sources in an automated fashion. You can
choose different data sources, say “Indeed” – this is a résumé website – and
say you want to find anyone who mentioned XKeyscore and for sake of timing let’s
just get people in Maryland. And “start collecting”, and it might take a second
because it’s still a bit rough. But it opens a browser, goes finds other people
who mention XKeyscore in Maryland and it goes and downloads all of their résumés
in one place… you can kind of see them as they download because this is being
slowed a bit down right now. That just works key services and fairly small.
*Something shouted from out of the audience* M.C.: *laughs*
*applause*
Takes a second to load, still kind of rough…
Yeah, so we’re hoping to add many different data sources, so that people can collect
data from sources online as well as just take a pile of pdf’s on their computer,
point at the directory and it will load them and OCR them and people will be able
to search through them in a searchable database.
So while this is loading why don’t I go and walk through some of the rest of the
pipeline. So our goal is to have tools for collecting data, loading it into
a database; and then tools for matching data across various sources on the same
person or the same company. So it should take someone’s résumés and Social Media
profiles and everything and link it together and then also link that to the
companies they work(ed) for, the other people they know, the locations they’ve
lived. As well as tools for extracting things from data. So to be able to go
through a résumé, extract all the code words mentioned, to be able to go through
a document and extract all the companies mentioned and generating
entities that way. And tools for searching through data in databases where you can
search for search queries and browse by categories. And for viewing data and
network graphs and maps. Let’s see if this is done… Right now it just shows the
raw JSON. The connection between tools is a bit rough. But we should be able to
index the data and load it into a search tool. Will take a second. Hopefully this
works. Ouh, it’s going! Yah… So it takes a little bit. Index… And you can see…
The data will be at… It kind of circle loaded into a subscriptions list…
So there’s a searchable database on all the people who are working on XKeyscore
in Maryland! *applause, cheers from audience*
So I think that in using this Free Software and open data really the key is
because we have far, far fewer resources than the Intelligence Community. And we
don’t even have the resources that a company like Lockheed Martin has. We can’t
internally build all of this software. I hope that we will anticipate every future
use to be able to help people adapt to that. Having people be able to take our
data, take our tools and adapt it to their own situations is absolutely key to
actually ensuring that they’re useful. And there are also a lot of open source tools
that the Intelligence Community has, really. It’s like accumulo, the thing
that’s used in Real Time Regional Gateway. It was released by the NSA and made open
source. And Gaffer which is a graph database recently released by GCHQ.
So we can sort of take those and possibly also build on those in some cases.
As well are using the same tools *chuckles*
And it’s appropriate because our goal is to enable people to collect and use
information in the same way that the Intelligence Community can.
But, well, I think that we should aim to collect it all and collect all the
information that we can. I think we also need to be careful to avoid a lot of the
mistakes that the Intelligence Community has made. Because some of the effects are
quite bad and lead to people being killed for no reason at all. And – it’s quite
absurd. And the main one of these, I think, is de-humanizing people.
Torture techniques are specifically designed to de-humanize people.
When people are looking at data that they’ve intercepted, they’re not looking
at a person, they’re looking at meta-data, they’re looking at numbers on a screen.
It’s not something that’s easy to find a way around. When I was working on ICWATCH
I was grabbling with this problem quite a bit. So I decided to try to see who some
of these people are and try to put faces to these issues. So I started going to
Intelligence conferences. Many of these conferences are quite open and you can
just go in. And I wasn’t that out of place either, I just told people that I made
tools to collect and analyze Open Source Intelligence.
*laughter and applause*
There're many people doing.
There’re many people doing simmilar things out there, too. Like I met the
Zerofox people who were one of the examples I showed earlier at one of these conferences.
They are actually very, very nice. And
there were also some people who were quite interested in what I was doing. There was
one recruiter from Northrop-Grumman who seemed somewhat interested in hiring me
and I looked her up later and found a bunch of job listings where she was
trying to hire people who… to work on programs related to XKeyscore. It wasn't
all good, I got kicked out of one conference. I got some strange requests like there was
one guy who was trying to figure how to use open data to help venture capitalists
figure out what porn the founders of the startups they funded watched. I’m not sure
that’s even possible. But it was really weird and he was asking me for help and
I was like “I don’t think I can help with that, sorry!”
*laughter and applause*
Of course there were some negative comments on things like Manning and Snowden
and some confusion like there was someone who is making insider threat detection
software, who was talking about how it would stop a situation like when Snowden
leaked documents to Wikileaks and things like that. So people don’t actually
know what’s going on. But generally most of them were decent people and some of
them were quite nice, some of them were quite funny. And some of them really
seemed to think that what they were doing is saving lives. So they’re not evil people
who want to hurt others but they’re not infallible either. They’re human beings.
And our strategy – looking at individuals – scares a lot of people. But what you
have to realize is that institutions are made up by people. It’s easier to just
look at the institution. It’s easier to just look at an abstract program. Just
like it’s easier not to think of the person who you just decided to kill in a
drone strike as a person. That’s why these things continue to happen. I think that
there’s a lot of benefit to looking at people as people, both to avoid some of
the problems the Intelligence Community has as well as because people’s data trails
are part of the data trails of the institutions. And if we’re only looking at
institutions we’re missing part of the data trail the people leave.
Though, of course, no one person is responsible for the wrong-doings of the
Intelligence Community. So we shouldn’t demonize any one person. But…
these are the people who go to work every day and perpetuate the actions of the
Intelligence Community. So I think everyone involved is a little bit at fault.
And the other benefit of looking at people as people is that we can start to
understand them. Because you have to understand what their hopes are, what
their fears are. How they see the world. What upsets them. And what might cause
them to change their behaviour. And from that we can start to maybe come up with
alternatives. So let’s look at some of these people and look at some of their
stories. This is Jason Epperson. He works on Intelligence collection for Special
Operations. In his spare time he enjoys coaching children sports. He currently
works at the US Special Ops Command (USSOCOM) helping different agencies
collect data, share it, say and figure out what data they need, just generally
helping them integrate it. But when he started his career back in 1998 also
working on collecting data for Special Operations. Then later, in 2004, he went
to work at the US Central Command in the NSA cryptologic services group and he was
focused on tracking down high-value targets and individuals. And he claimed
that as a result of his work, numerous high-value individuals were captured
or killed. It is especially interesting because he was working on this in 2007
when PRISM was launched and at the top of his résumé he lists in his specialties
PRISM as “possible”, so that’s kind of a dinagra but based on his background it
might not be. So I think it probably is actually PRISM.
Then after he was working there he went and started working counter-radicalization
efforts – things like boosting the capacity of Muslim Faith Leaders to win
hearts and minds and establishing competing social networks to counter
Al Qaeda ideology and he’s very clear in his job description that he’s not killing
people, he’s just helping allies of the US figure out who is who, set Interpol notices for.
But the most interesting thing about him isn’t any of his jobs. It’s this
publication that he has at the bottom of his résumé called “An Examination of the
Effect of Government Data Mining on US Citizens”. And this clearly an area where
he has a lot of expertise. And he presented this at a conference back in
2010. I still don’t have a copy yet. It’s not easily available. I think it might be
possible to get either by buying it from the company directly or by going to the
Library of Congress that seems to have some copies of the conference proceedings.
That could be quite interesting. Both because he was relatively high up, he was
in command of nearly 400 people back when PRISM started and he was working with the
NSA. It’s possible that he had some role early on in the program and this might
provide some clues. And then also the little “data mining on US Citizens” a bit
in the title is kind of interesting because that’s supposed to be the last
protection – I think that’s kind of a super protection because most US citizens
wouldn’t find it very comforting if the Chinese Government said: “Oh yeah, we have
a mass surveillance program but we only spy on people who aren’t Chinese citizens.”
That’s not really comforting to them, so I don’t see why it would be. But it’s been
the one thing that people were impeding. “We don’t collect it on US citizens”. And
just seeing that on the title of a paper is like a tiny admission that maybe they
do. So some of these (?) files tell other interesting stories about people’s lives.
If you’ve seen any of my other talks, this is someone you’ve heard me talk about
a lot. Solomon Varnado. He spent most of his life in the military intelligence
community, focused on Signals Intelligence and Geolocation. He took down his résumé
after ICWATCH launched. But I actually recently found another résumé of his on
another website that has additional information like on the side in the
military he ran diversity programs and a sexual assault prevention program and
things like that. I first came across this profile because he mentions a lot of
interesting code words. This is probably the first known mention of XKeyscore back
in 2004/2005. But these aren’t the most interesting part of his résumé. Later on
he… after he works on Intelligence Collection Management – just Standard
Signals Intelligence Collection – he goes and he works for L-3 Stratis. And there he
says that he identified, collected, and performed direction finding
of specified target signals using PENNANTRACE, DISPLAYVIEW and CEGS.
But I wasn't sure what “PENNANTRACE” was
so I found it a definition very conveniently located in
another résumé. That said it was an airborne collection platform for PENNANTRACE.
That sounds like some sort of Signals Intelligence collection platform.
And the other interesting thing about this job is that he said that he called for
external review of intelligence management processes which is not something I see
normally. And he was there for a fairly short time, only a couple of months.
After staying at most of his other jobs for over a year. And then at his next job
he was also there for only a couple of months.
He was working at Pluribus International, also on Drone Intelligence,
this time definitely Drone Intelligence, on Predator drones because he
mentions Airhandler which we now know more about thanks to the catalogue
released by The Intercept. It’s a
geo-processing system for geolocation data from Predator drones.
And the update to ICWATCH includes all the data on all of the words
mentioned in that catalogue. And then he leaves the Intelligence Community
entirely after that job. And he goes and works as a used car salesman at this used
car dealership. And it turns out he is actually – found him on this other résumé
that I just found – He’s actually quite a successful used cars salesman.
He’s won a bunch of awards. He’s one of the best
salesmen in the region. So he’s doing quite well. And he won a bunch of awards
and he's in the military too, so it seems like
he’s very committed to what he does. But still that’s quite a huge career
change and it sounds like maybe he was starting to get upset with some of how
things are really being done and he couldn’t figure out a way to fix it after
calling for external review so he just left.
*applause*
And then, this is Michael Dial. Michael Dial is a pipe fitter and a plumber. And
this is him with his family. He’s actually a pipe fitter and a plumber. But he’s not
just any pipe fitter. He has security clearance. And he goes and he fits pipes
in secure facilities. As you might expect he does a lot of pipe fitting for naval
ships. He also does things like he goes to embassies and other secret locations in
Afghanistan and Iraq, Ecuador, Serbia and sets up their pipes. He also did some
pipe fitting in Djibouti at some sort of Homeland Security facility which
coincidently is also where many of the drone programs are run out of. So there’s
some interesting cases like that’s where there are people like Michael Dial who
aren’t involved in Intelligence at all, directly. But the information in the
résumés still provides very interesting useful details about where secret
facilities are located and other aspects of the Intelligence Community. Because
secret facilities don’t just materialize out of thin air. They need people to build
them, they need people to operate them. So from tracking down these people we can
start to map them. And then there’re other useful things like we can figure out which
companies clean the NSA. I’m sure that has all sorts of useful applications.
This is Eleana Costa. He lives in D.C. and he works for the DOD. And this is him at his
High School Graduation back in 1988. He has been working in Military and
Intelligence for nearly 20 years. And back in 2003, he worked on Psi Ops programs.
Specifically he worked on Psi Ops programs in Paraguay, Columbia and Bolivia. And
these were in support of DEED, the drug enforcement agency and the CIA.
And there are a few other reasons ICWATCH you mention involvement in Psi Ops in
Latin America for the DEA. It seems me quite an extensive thing especially since
I didn’t collect any data on this specifically, and I had just suddenly a bunch
of people on the database on this, so: maybe worth looking into a bit. And then
after that he went and he worked on Psi Ops programs in Iraq. So it’s kind of
interesting. Then he went and worked at the DOD on Human Intelligence.
The other interesting thing about Kiliana Costa is that he’s one of the people who
deleted his résumé after ICWATCH launched and that was how I found him.
*laughter and applause*
So after ICWATCH launched a lot of people were positively interested in it, but we
also got a lot of threats because… it’s really absurd, because all we’re doing is
collecting information that people explicitly, independently, willingly
posted online about the profession; as we’re not posting addresses or
anything like that. And making it more searchable. Just like google does.
But a lot of people in the Intelligence Community contacted us and for the first
few weeks, we saw a new response every day. Some of these were kind of
interesting and reveals some sort of non- sensical mind sets of people in the
Intelligence Community. Like this guy. This is Alexander Irinovitch. He sent me
a…, actually a nice email, a very nice email. It was really nice. Saying that he
couldn’t understand why he was in ICWATCH because he wasn’t involved in surveillance.
He was working at a private company that had nothing to do with surveillance.
So I looked at his profile and I saw that he was working at unit 8200, the Israeli
Intelligence unit which, okay, there are mandatory military services not that
weird, though he was there for several years, not just the mandatory portion,
and this is the Intelligence unit that spies on Palestinians. And then I looked
at where he works now. And he works for a company called Verint. According to their
website they make software for analyzing data from wiretaps. So I think that has to
do with surveillance. I’m not sure why he interpreted that as “nothing to do with
surveillance”. But it’s kind of interesting interpretation, I think it makes sense for him
to be in the database, but of course, for any particular profile, there is
some noise. So it’s up to whoever is looking at it to make the call
and do the research.
And sometimes other people who complained also helped us find interesting details.
Like this guy, Joshua Lively. He’s one of the people who reported us to the FBI for
domestic terrorism. He worked as a linguist at this company. I looked at
his profile and he mentions a lot of interesting code words in it.
Some of them didn’t make so much sense for the time. This thing called ZB.
And then a few weeks later the Intercept released this article on a thing called
Skynet. It’s used to use machine learning to analyze travel data, the telecom
providers. And ZB is one of the databases they use and he, coincidently, has a lot
of the databases that are used in this listed in his skills. And as a linguist
professioned with the language that’s used in the region that’s mainly targeted
in this… So I’m not sure if he’s involved in this particular program. But it seems
like he’s involved in something similar.
So it’s quite interesting. Generally there are a lot of angry people in the
Intelligence Community. Some are nicer than others and were just asking questions
being like “Can you please take my profile down!”, some other more afraid, some other
were more violent and sending things like death threats. Our server started getting
hit pretty hard and ICWATCH kept going down. We wanted to be sure that we weren’t
going to be compelled to take the data down some way. And the easiest way not
to be compelled to take the data down is to make it so you can’t really take the
data down yourself. And the people had much less incentive to go after you.
So we moved ICWATCH to Wikileaks which has been great, and they’ve been wonderful
helping with all this. So thank you, Wikileaks!
*applause*
*from the audience:* Your welcome!
M.C.: *chuckles* *laughter*
As I mentioned earlier a lot of people are taking down their résumés in response to
ICWATCH. Specifically 1.030 people have, out of the original 27.000. And others have
edited them and made them private. So as part of the update in addition to doubling
the number of résumés available we also recollected all of the initial résumés
and you can go on the site and see which ones are removed, which ones are made
private, which ones have been modified and all of that is fug so you can easily see
how that’s changed. *applause*
And some of these revealed details that people hadn’t posted… that many wish that
they hadn’t posted in the first place. But they also provide useful updates on where
people are working. Because they’re to track people as they move from job to job.
E.g. there’s this guy, Michael Acosta, from the original ICWATCH. From 2011
to 2012 he worked at Guantanamo. He was primarily trying to find out about
potential attacks on Guantanamo itself. He monitored various detainees and
collaborated with the Behavioural Science Team and was trying to figure out if
detainees were planning some sort of coup, I guess. And then he started working for
the Airforce. And here he was working on Drone Intelligence and targeting and such
things like how he was responsible for “the production made instant upgrade of
DGS2 mission critical Intelligence databases which include high value target
development folders” like the things used for JPAL targeting, regional fairbriefs,
mission storyboards and mission target logs with document FMV mission rollups.
But the most interesting thing on this résumé isn’t any of those things.
It’s the thing that changed between the original launch of ICWATCH and now.
And that’s that he moved and started working for a different company.
He started working for this company called… he called SOS International
as All Source Analyst. He unfortunately had to leave the position that he had
on the site coaching High School Baseball which he seemed to really like.
And he kind of liked it because right now he’s looking for Baseball opportunities
in Germany. So he seems to be in Germany working for this company called SOS
International that I never heard of before. So I went on the website and they
have a list of the cities that they operate in Germany. These 6 cities,
along with Guantanamo and a number of other sketchy locations. And based on
Michael Acosta’s past record of working at Guantanamo and on Drone targeting and
things like that it sounds like this company is probably doing something quite
sketchy. By tracking changes to where people work we can start to find things
like this we might not otherwise think to look at. That we might not otherwise about
as interesting.
But it’s not just open data that we collect. Because the same tools for
collecting and analyzing open data are also useful for other data sets,
they’re useful. Like we made a search tool in collaboration with Church Foundation
for all of the published Snowden documents that allows you to search the full text of
the documents, browse which code words are in these documents, see documents that
mention particular countries, see the full PDFs and articles. And we also made a…
when the Hacking Team data came out this summer we mirrored the data and became one
of the primary mirrors of the data. We had a torrent that was almost downing the server
with a lot of space and figured that none of the other people had that, so we put it
up. And that got a lot of traffic, it got about 57 M hits in the first 2 days.
And soon we realized there was a problem where our server charged a lot for
bandwidth and did cost us 48$ everytime someone decided to download the 400GB
with WGET. So that was interesting but it’s been resolved now. It hopefully made
the data more accessible to people who don’t have 400GB of harddrive space
available or enough internet connectivity to download that. So then we’ve also made
a search tool for all of the Hacking Team emails; that has a search interface that
lets you browse them like you would in a normal email client with threading, and a
network graph so that you can see the connections between senders and
recipients. The Intelligence Community has a variety of collection disciplines:
SIGINT, OSINT, HUMINT, measurements of Signals Intelligence, Symmetry
Intelligence. They have all these different sources that they’re gathering
data from. I think that we should try to duplicate this. Because there are a lot
of different sources that we can gather data from as well, and we need to find
base to better collect data from all these sources and to fuse them together.
These are some other ones that I’ve been spending all the time looking at.
And there’s open source Intelligence things like ICWATCH where you’re
collecting data from purely public sources. But this is just part of the vare
ecosystem that we can draw on. This is mostly information that people and
institutions make about themselves publicly, either intentionally or
unintentionally. And it’s really difficult to use because there’s a lot of it and it
needs to be collected and matched up and pulled together in a browsable way for
people to be able to use it. So you can’t really just mainly go and use it at scale.
You can do it a little bit but not nearly enough. And so we’re working on making
this easier to use. The other sort of data, it’s anonymously leaked documents,
documents that were (?) sent journalists, that they think should be
public and these often pretty explicitly reveal corruption, human rights abuses
or other issues. But this can also be used to collect more data. Like we used the
published Snowden documents very heavily to find code words that we could use to
collect the data in ICWATCH. And once we start to collect data on secret things
that were recently not known at all, but now are, and we can find data on that, we
can start to find data on unknown code words and unknown things that we might not
otherwise recognize. And then there’s data released by governments, from FOIA
requests through open data initiatives. This, of course, can be spun or things can
be held back. So it’s not ideal to use on its own. But it can be used like the other
2 types with in combination with each other. You can use that to provide context, you
can use open source data to frame FOIA requests and things like that. So the goal
of Transparency Toolkit is to make it easier to collect all these types of data
in one place and to start to use this data in the same ways that the Intelligence
Community uses the data collected from all the various collection disciplines.
Except their goal isn’t to kill people or be some sort of omniscient to God-like being
but we just want to build some sort of external structure of accountability.
To make it easier to uncover and understand things like surveillance programs or human
rights abuses or corruption. And when we can find the people and companies that are
involved in things like surveillance we can start to map who’s doing what.
And we can start to request information about specific contracts. And we know who
we can ask questions about particular programs. And then we can start to use the
data to start legal cases against specific companies. And we can start to take more
concrete actions than we would be able to, otherwise, if we were dealing simply in
theory or in guesses as to what’s going on.
So – open source intelligence – let’s just be more pro-active and more direct with
our techniques. And it also lets us find some of this information earlier, because
many of the programs mentioned in the Snowden documents were mentioned first
in other and open data sources. And if we can start to figure out where these are
and start to figure out what they are, then we know what data we’re missing and
we can start to go after it with FOIA requests or trying to find it by other
means. But all of this a really, really big project and we can’t… this is not
going to work if it’s just us working on it. We need to work with other people.
We need to work with activists who have ideas of how they want to use the data.
We need to work with journalists that collect the data and write stories about
it. We need to work with human rights lawyers to help them with their research
help them build legal cases based on the findings. We need to work with NGOs and
human rights researchers who want to collect and use open data in their work.
And we need more people going through databases like ICWATCH. This doesn’t
require any special expertise. You gain the knowledge that you need as you’re
going through them looking up terms. It’s not easy but it can be quite interesting
once you combine all of these obscure terms and it’s like “Oh, that’s what
they’re doing!” and oftentimes what they’re doing is something entirely absurd
like reading all your email or killing people.
And we also need software developers to help develop software and help us figure
out how all of these tools should fit together. So if anyone’s interested in
working with us to take on the Intelligence Agencies of the world and
figure out what they’re doing please let us know. I think it sounds a bit insane
and I know that, but (they) have far more resources and far more experience but if
we keep ignoring the situation and we continue as we are now making scattered
attempts to change things that aren’t coordinated, that are based on limited
information, nothing is going to change longterm. So I think we need to collect
all the information we can and figure out how to effectively combine it and use it
for concrete goals. And I think we need to do this with free software and open
data, because against such powerful adversaries they’re probably the best
hopes we have.
*applause*
Herald: Thank you, thank you so much! Now we have the round of Q&A,
for anyone who liked to ask a question, please forward to the mikes on both sides
of this Saal (Hall). Start taking the question from…
*is nodding towards first person asking* …yeah.
Q: So I’d like to ask about documents which are scans. Which are sometimes
released as official open source information. What kind of workflow do you
have or even if you have any kind of workflow for some OCR on these…!?
M.C.: A serious (?) that depends on the document. There’s some open source
software called Tesseract that’s quite good, but it doesn’t always work in cases
where there needs to be more specialized parsing. I like to use something that’s
called Abbyy (FineReader) which is, unfortunately, not open source and we are
looking for an alternative. For the published Snowden documents, because we
needed to extract the classification headers and that wasn’t so working with
Tesseract. But Tesseract works for most things.
*listens to unrecorded comment from the audience*
Yeah.
Herald: Thank you. Do we have question from… [the internet]? Yeah, oui!
Signal Angel: Yes, rooty is asking on IRC: What would you recommend the NSA to
develop towards a future of Social Usefulness!??
E.g. what value have databases from 2015, people cell phone sensors in 2115!??
Could you give the NSA, maybe CEO there, useful work!??
M.C.: Can you rephr..-, sorry !??
Signal Angel: *naively repeats first of the apparent Troll questions*
M.C.: *laughs* Social Usefulness…
Probably the most useful thing they could do is stop collecting the data in the
first place, especially the data that’s being intercepted or illegally collected.
There’s probably some amounts of useful tracking they could do, but I’m not sure
that’s the best approach using the tactice that they were to collect the data at that
time.
Herald: Thank you. So, next question from you, please!
Question: Hello, thanks for the talk, that was one of the best ones I’ve seen at this
congress. I was wondering what you think about the question you’re raising about
“we shouldn’t make the same mistakes”. Because I’m not totally sure that’s
possible because of things I’ve seen in other communities. All communities have
their extremists and they will abuse this data. And then that allows a political
attack on you, because they say you made that happen, it’s not true. But it will celd
people. So how do you protect against that?
M.C.: I think it’s hard to entirely protect against it because we can’t
control the actions of other people. But people could also go off and use this data
negatively by collecting it on their own, independently of us. I was actually quite
impressed, after we launched ICWATCH, I haven’t heard of anyone complaining of
threats that they’ve gotten from people…
People in the Intelligence Community: I haven’t heard of anyone in the
Intelligence Community complaining about threats that they’ve gotten as the results
of ICWATCH being launched. All of the complaints have been theoretical. The only
threats I’ve heard of resulting from ICWATCH are that from the Intelligence
Community to us. I haven’t heard of anything, so I’ve been very impressed with
the civility of the internet in that case. And I think that maybe, by framing it, and
actually bringing it down to the individual level, and making it clear that
these are people, that makes it a little bit less likely that people will go after
them in a vicious way.
Q: Have you thought of creating a kind of usage guidelines? I mean that's not gonna change what
anyone does. But if someone does something you can then say “That’s against our usage
guidelines” and it’s a political defence against someone accusing it…
M.C.: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any way that we can enforce something like that.
But we do try to be very careful with how we’re framing it in saying – like I -
since a long time, all this talk saying these are people that are not evil people. They’re
normal people that you should look at as such. So I think being very careful of
framing it and we’ll be developing some sort of guidelines. That’s definitely a
good idea.
Herald: Thank you. Your question, please!
Troll: Hi! First, thank you very much for this tool that makes it possible to fight
back against, legally. For people who try to punish or yeah…
What I have to say, or my question is: I worked in the last 3 1/2 years, let’s say,
in the field of IT Forensics. And I worked with Maltego and stuff, and so I know what
a lot of work it is to collect data and bring it into good conditions, so others
could read it or you can get a goal, or see a goal. And what I personally think
is very important: this could be very sensible data to people and my question
is: How do you care that this data which you will offer to download will keep
safe? That’s the first question, and the second is: Did you think about
verifications? So you are collecting a lot of data, and in a few years another person
wants to see if this data was correct. So do you verify the sources like MD5 sum
or so you can say “This fingerprint taken at this-day and this-time is correct?”
M.C.: For the first question: I don’t think there’s really… I’m not sure (?)
protected because this is a version that people posted publicly themselves. So they
sort of said that they don’t want it to be protected or secured because they’re
posting it on the public internet. So I’m not sure there’s really any reason to try
to protect it when it’s something that they’ve published very publicly.
And on the second one, for verification, that’s quite tricky with some of the data
especially around the Intelligence Community because all of these things
are secretive and it’s hard to confirm them. We can confirm them against each
other like now we have multiple résumé sites on ICWATCH, so sometimes we can find
the same person’s résumé on another site and compare over time and we can go
finding their profiles they have and try to combine as much data on the same
as is possible and have it over time.
Q: What I did: I made a fingerprint when I downloaded a website, I made a
fingerprint and then I can say OK, this is… yeah.
M.C.: Of truth verifying various actions collected, then. Yeah, I mean that's a bit harder to
absolutely do that on the behalf all of the full text of the web page save, then
we have it all published on Github so you can verify those collected then but, yeah.
Herald: We’ll take the questions from up there.
Jake Appelbaum: Hi, community extremist here… So I wanted to say something which
is that I think what Julian did for leaking documents you’re doing for
analysis. Which is really great! Because transparency is enough – you need action!
And so I just wanted to say that I hope that everyone can give and see in
Transparency Toolkit a lot of material support. And maybe a round of applause!
*applause*
Definitely the best talk at the congress and I had a couple of suggestions. But
one of them is: I think it would be great if you could focus on American Domestic
Police Agencies. M.C.: Hmm-mhm…
Jake: In particular collecting the images of Police Academy Graduation photographs.
And to be able to move in the direction of facial recognition, so that we can find
Undercover Police Officers that are in our midst…
*applause*
And I think it would be great if you could create a FOIA wizard, essentially, ’cause
everybody likes wizards, and who doesn’t like UNIX… So it’d be great if you could
create a FOIA wizard where you could say: “I wanna know about these terms” and it
would just generate automatically – maybe by partnering with Macroc e.g. –
interesting things, where there’s a kind of “Wait!”. Where you realize there’s a lot
of people working on this classified program and it’s at this agency and they
have a contract with this company and these are the people involved and just
automatically generate those FOIAs and then get people to sort of sign up to put
their name down and sort of sponsor a little transparency and to say “Oh, that’s
the FOIA I wanna get behind, I’m in a check on it, you know, once a week, I’m
gonna do this thing. Through Macroc.” I think that would be a way to take this
information in a legal manner and to make it actionable. And I think there’s lots of
other interesting things you could do that are not about the law. But I leave that to
the imagination of other people. It should be legal but it doesn’t need to be through
legal channels like, say, FOIA. So thanks for the work that you’re doing, M.C. and
I hope that you will expand it to, basically, all of the pigs of the whole
world. And I would really encourage you to read Hannah Ahrend’s “Eichmann in
Jerusalem”, because you described a fundamental thing: these people aren’t
evil. But actually, Evil itself doesn’t exist. These people are the Banality of
Evil. They’re people who have soccer practice, and they have a dog, and they
like to go home and fuck their wife, and they’re regular people who do drone
strikes.
*applause*
Herald: Thank you. We have a question on mike 1.
Q: How easy is it to add support for new databases or new sources of information?
M.C.: It depends on the source and how that site is structured. But generally
it’s not too difficult. The adding to proper new sources does require
programming at this point. But it’s not particularly complex programming and we
have some libraries that make some parts of it easier, as well. And if you’re
interested in adding a data source we’re more than happy to help with that.
Q: Awesome! My favourite is the list of… the report of when people were denied
security clearance and why and if their appeal was then, like, removed.
M.C.: Yeah, that would be quite interesting!
Q: Okay!
Herald: If there’s no further questions… moment…
yeah, okay! Please!
Q: Yesterday it was said that we have to make sure that they know that we watch
them and make sure that they know that we watch them. Because some day they will get
prosecuted. So, in some way. I think you are exactly doing this. So this is
brilliant. Are you already in the stage where you’re thinking you can start
concrete legal actions against some individuals that you are getting
information with your tools. We’ve been working with some lawyers towards that.
We are looking to do more in this, so if you know… if you have any ideas for
particular situations where this may be applicable, our lawyers, that we should
work with, let us know! But we’re working towards that and making some progress.
Q: Thanks!
Herald: Getting a question from up there, please!
Q: I just wanna say that you are a visionary who is more passionate than
anybody I have ever collaborated with and it’s a total honor.
*applause*
Herald: Thank you.
M.C.: Yeah, and just to everyone, that’s Brennan who also works on Transparency
Toolkit. He made the awesome UI for Harvester and Lookingglass that you saw
in the Tabs of all this.
*applause*
Jake: If no one else is gonna ask a question, I’d like to ask a question which
I know the answer to but no one else in the room does. And I think it’s very
fascinating. I wonder if you could talk about lessons that you’ve learned from
studying about the South African Resistance to Apartheid.
*M.C. is laughing* Jake: And maybe you could talk about the
things that drive you to work on these things. E.g. what inspires you to justice?
E.g. experiences at MIT and maybe – I mean if you don’t want to talk about it, I’m
sorry for asking it. But if you do wanna talk about it I think you can inspire
everyone else here to raise their fist with you! In solidarity.
M.C.: Yeah… Okay… I guess it’s been nearly 3 years now, so maybe that’s okay
to talk about. 3 years ago there was this case at MIT… everyone has probably heard
of Aaron Swartz and he was being prosecuted for downloading documents from
JSTOR. And I was brought in trying to figure out MIT’s role in this situation, and if you
might be able to sway a public opinion, a few people in Boston. I think some of
them are in this room. And we were trying to help him. And eventually, part way into
the process, he became afraid and decided that it would be more risky for us to help
him, with the prosecutor who might lash back, so we stopped. But one of the things
that I did in this process was, I sent out a survey to all of the professors at MIT
asking their opinion on his case. And whether they identified with his actions.
And I got a lot of response to this survey. Some were quite nice and were
quite supportive. Some were very vicious, saying that he should go to jail and that
he is a waste of humanity and he works at this Harvard Center for Ethics, so how is
this ethical. And things like that. They were quite horrible. And initially he had
access to this database and somehow over the next year, when we weren’t doing much,
he lost access to this database. And he emailed me asking for access again. And
back then I was on some stupid kick about research ethics and redaction and thought
that there’s no reason to… It really seems that’s like “I cannot give you the answers
about the names”. I was just stupid because the names are the most useful part of that
data. And I kind of abandoned him, along with a lot of other people in that. And I
feel like if I had given him the names that might have been something that could
be used to find supporters within MIT or people who were rallying against him. And
I don’t think it would have made a huge difference but it might have made just a
little bit. And that was one of the things that really showed me the power of data on
individuals and the role of individuals within institutions. And I feel like I
really failed there. So I don’t want to do that again.
*applause*
Herald: Thank you. Unfortunately, we need to wrap up because we are out of time.
Thank you for attending this very interesting lecture and, quite touching
in the end.
*postroll music*
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