Social networks, surveillance, and terrorism
January 10, 2012 by Amara D. Angelica
(Credit: iStockphoto)
“We are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people’s lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve,” claims militant digital privacy advocate Eben Moglen, Betabeat reports.
“And all of that data is being collected and sold by people whose goal it is to make a profit selling the ability to control human beings by knowing more about themselves than they know,” he says. “You are more heavily surveilled than the KGB or Stasi or Securitate or any other secret police ever surveilled anybody… We have an enormous ecological disaster created by badly-designed social media now being used by people to control and exploit human beings in all sorts of ways.”
In September, Facebook announced a brand new type of profile called Timeline, where your whole personal history is laid out month-by-month, all the way back to your birth. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is unhappy with the way Facebook launched Timeline, and sent a letter to the FTC on Dec. 27 asking it to investigate, ZDNET reports. EPIC says Facebook went too far because it started rolling out the redesign without asking users first. Facebook would love to have everyone fill in their past, of course; it provides yet another set of data that advertisers can exploit, New Scientist reports.
But uploading our entire lives could have more long-term consequences than a few targeted ads, experts warn.
Terrorists recruiting on Facebook
According to a new study just announced by Prof. Gabriel Weimann of the University of Haifa, hackers invading databases — like the recent huge security breach of Stratfor (including defense, intelligence and police officials, The Guardian now reports) — is just the tip of the iceberg in online terrorist activity. International terrorist organizations have shifted their Internet activity focus to social networks and a number of Facebook groups are asking users to join and support Hezbollah, Hamas and other armed groups that have been included in the West’s list of declared terror organizations.
“Today, about 90% of organized terrorism on the Internet is being carried out through the social media. By using these tools, the organizations are able to be active in recruiting new friends without geographical limitations,” says Weimann.
Over the past ten years, he has been conducting a study of encoded and public Internet sites of international terror organizations, groups supporting these organizations, forums, video clips, and whatever information relating to global terrorism is running through the network.
The following correspondence, for example, was easily found on the open, non-coded forum belonging to Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades: “I have a kilogram of acetone. I want to know how to make an explosive with it to blow up a military jeep.” A forum member promptly responded with descriptive instructions on how to turn the explosive liquid into a destructive tool.
Comments (6)
by Giuliano Valverde da Silva
So Hamas and Hezollah calling for people to join them is terrorism, but America’s Army, an FPS game produced by the U.S. Army as recruitment propaganda tool to lure kids into joining the Army isn’t? Apart from how both are PERCEIVED by the West and SPUN by the Fawning Corporate Media, what exactly is the difference?
by policetac
Imagine the data Google really has on you.. How long have you used the same e-mail address? The same browser? Username?
by dougw659
Yeah this isn’t a new paradigm either. You can go back to the land barons of medieval Europe, who were constantly being brought to economic collapse by fear of roving bandits. Farmers would abandon their lands and seek safety in castles, the barons were forced to raise militias to clean out the bands of robbers (ironically often by hiring mercenaries who were previously part of the robbers band!). The unworked farms, combined with the need for additional security was usually enough to weaken the baron’s economic strength to where they became overly vulnerable to their real enemies, and the rest as they say, is history….
by Khannea Suntzu
Activities on Facebook et.al. by such organization’s aren’t “terrorism”. If certain groups don’t agree with the geopolitical order they should have a right to lobby to change this geopolitical order, no matter how distasteful these groups are. We shouldn’t be terrified “chicken little’s” and run around screaming all gay.
I’d rather see Hezbollah or Al Qaeida infiltrate Facebook (Or Second Life ha!) – where they are damn likely to be ‘ideologically counter infiltrated – rather than muck about like idiots conspiracy in a paranoid state in some remote training facility.
But oh wait, isn’t that what most of the US intelligence community is doing right now? Conspiring hysterically in some remote “ivory tower” training facility, over and over reading “the new american century”, gyrating in it’s own blacks ops secretions on Neo-Stalinist Neo-con drivel, actively obsessing with denying the rest of the progressively less free world stuff it wants for its own next years budget cycle?
Mine! Mine! Preciousss!!
Self fulfilling prophecy tards is what self fulfilling prophecy tards do.
If I were a terrorist group right now, the best way to bring down the infidel west is by overextending it in these budgets. It wouldn’t be to hard to create this hysteria of fake terrorist groups all over the world and over-titillate the anglo-saxon security/intelligence (read the anglo-saxon privilege protection) community. Just tickle the paranoid people, and not long before year the US collapses under yet another TLW agency budget increase.
Worked with the Soviets too right? And NOBODY misses those belligerent psychopaths.
by Mr Bacon
Asking for help turning acetone into explosives is most certainly a terrorist activity. And frothing about “Neo-Stalinist Neo-con drivel” is, well… overheated, paranoid drivel. Do you really think that what the US intelligence agencies are doing even remotely resembles what Stalin’s intelligence agencies did? And you’re accusing people of being “terrified Chicken Littles?” Please.
As for the whole issue of social networking data being mined for surveillance purposes: If you don’t want others, including the government, to learn a lot of details about your life, maybe you shouldn’t be putting that information on public display. I long ago decided not to participate in Facebook, Myspace, or anything else that’s not anonymous, partly because putting a lot of personal info on display for millions of total strangers to examine is both narcissistic and risky. Facebook already has so many previous documented violations of the privacy rights of their users that anyone who still uses it is an addicted. masochistic idiot who has little right to complain.
by Gassie
Therefore, Catch-22 ensures that no pilot can ever be grounded for being insane even if he is.
A logical formulation of this situation is:
(Premise: If a person is excused from flying (E) because of mental illness, that must be because he is both insane (I), and requests an evaluation (R));
(Premise: If a person is insane (I), he should not realize that he is, and would have no reason to request an evaluation)
(2, Definition of implication: since an insane person would not request an evaluation, it follows that all people must either not be insane, or not request an evaluation)
(3, De Morgan: since all people must either not be insane, or not request an evaluation, it follows that no person is both insane and requests an evaluation)
(4, 1, Modus Tollens: since a person may be excused from flying only if he is both insane and requests an evaluation, but no person can be both insane and request an evaluation, it follows that no person can be excused from flying for reasons of insanity)