- They thought they were making routine purchases-the innocent,
everyday pickups of charcoal and hummus, bleach and sandwich bags, that
keep the modern household running. Regulars at a national grocery chain,
these thousands and thousands of shoppers used the store's preferred-customer
cards, in the process putting years of their lives on file. Perhaps they
expected their records would be used by marketers trying to better target
consumers. Instead, says the company's privacy consultant, the data was
used by government agents hunting for potential terrorists.
-
- The saga began with a misguided fit of patriotism mere
weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, when a corporate
employee handed over the records-almost literally, the grocery lists-to
federal investigators from three agencies that had never even requested
them. In a flash, the most quotidian of exchanges became fodder for the
Patriot Act.
-
- When the company's legal counsel discovered the breach,
she turned for advice to Larry Ponemon, CEO of the consulting firm Privacy
Council and a former business ethics professor at Babson College and SUNY.
"I told her it's better to be transparent," Ponemon recalls.
"Send a notice to loyalty cardholders telling them what happened.
She agreed and presented that to the board but they said, 'No, we don't
want to hand a smoking gun to litigators.' " The attorney, who has
since resigned from the grocery chain, declined through Ponemon to be interviewed
or to identify herself or her former employer. To this day, the customers
haven't been informed.
-
- "It wasn't a case of law enforcement being egregiously
intrusive or an evil agency planting a bug or wiretap. It was a marketing
person saying, 'Maybe this will help you catch a bad guy,' " Ponemon
says.
-
- As John Ashcroft's Citizens Corps spy program prepares
for its debut next month, it seems scores of American companies have already
become willing snitches. A few months ago, the Privacy Council surveyed
executives from 22 companies in the travel industry-not just airlines but
hotels, car rental services, and travel agencies-and found that 64 percent
of respondents had turned over information to investigators and 59 percent
had lowered their resistance to such demands. In that sampling, conducted
with The Boston Globe, half of the businesses said they hadn't decided
if they'd inform customers of the change, and more than a third said outright
that they wouldn't. Only three said they would go public about the level
of their cooperation with law enforcement.
-
- The final destination of all that data scares Ponemon
and other civil libertarians, defenders of the Fourth Amendment prohibition
on unreasonable search and seizure. Ponemon, for one, suggests federal
authorities are plugging the information into algorithms, using the complex
formulas to create a picture of general-population trends that can be contrasted
with the lifestyles of known terrorists. If your habits match, expect further
scrutiny at the least.
-
- "I can't reveal my source, but a federal agency
involved in espionage actually did a rating system of almost every citizen
in this country," Ponemon claims. "It was based on all sorts
of information-public sources, private sources. If people are not opted
in"-meaning they haven't chosen to participate-"one can generally
assume that information was gathered through an illegal system."
-
- After crunching those numbers through the algorithm,
he says, its creators fed in the files of the 9-11 terrorists as a test.
"The model showed 89.7 percent accuracy 'predicting' these people
from rest of population," Ponemon reports.
-
- Oddly enough, "one of the factors was if you were
a person who frequently ordered pizza and paid with a credit card,"
Ponemon says, describing the buying habits of a nation of college students.
"Sometimes data leads to an empirical inference when you add it to
other variables. Whether this one is relevant or completely spurious remains
to be seen, but those kinds of weird things happen with data."
-
- The thirst for consumer records is bipartisan. In April,
Bill Clinton told the BBC that when it comes to fighting terrorism, "more
than 95 percent of the people that are in the United States at any given
time are in the computers of companies that mail junk mail, and you can
look for patterns there."
-
- Katherine Albrecht, a crusader against grocery loyalty
cards and invasive marketing, notes in a paper to be published in the Denver
Law Review, "Virginia Congressmen Jim Moran (D-VA) and Tom Davis (R-VA)
recently introduced legislation that would require all states' driver's
licenses and ID cards to contain an embedded computer chip capable of accepting
'data or software written to the license or card by non-governmental devices.'
" The mandatory "smart chips" would carry bank and debit
card data so that citizens could use their ID cards "for a variety
of commercial applications." Even library records, shopping coupons,
and health records could be stored on the chips.
-
- Adding to this vision of technological dystopia, companies
are already developing cameras and other scanners that can seamlessly trace
individuals as they wander through stores, going so far as to zoom in on
their faces should they linger over an item, to provide retailers with
ever more data.
-
- The problem is that, as with the link between take-out
pizza and terrorism, statistics don't always prove cause and effect. Mathematician
Karen Kafadar of the University of Colorado at Denver explains that such
a finding is "a proxy. It just happened to have something that correlated.
There's actually something else going on but it's an indicator, like drinking
beer and lung cancer might be. Beer doesn't cause lung cancer, but people
drinking a lot of beer might also be smoking."
-
- Ponemon is more concerned about process than the data
itself. "Total privacy does shelter bad guys, there's no question
about that. But transparency is also good," he argues. "There
should be some labeling or notice." In theory, consumers and investors
could punish offending companies by channeling their money elsewhere. Without
honest managers, though, the free market's self-correcting mechanism never
gets a chance to kick in.
-
- Librarians have filled their listservs with e-mails sharing
strategies for resisting law enforcement attempts to grab hold of their
users' book lists. But the corporate world doesn't foster that kind of
purist culture. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation came knocking
for the names of scuba divers this spring, the Professional Association
of Diving Instructors forked over a roll of more than 2 million certified
divers without so much as being served a subpoena.
-
- The feds were acting on no specific threat, just a hunch
that someone might attack that way. And again, these data dumps are just
attempts to do good. Would Attorney General John Ashcroft's new TIPS campaign-the
Terrorism Information and Prevention System-encourage people like the mole
at the grocery store chain to spill info into the tanks of unethical investigators?
-
- The Department of Justice, which seeks informants in
utility, cable, and other such industries operating in communities, denies
that it will cultivate sources placed in data-mining operations. "This
makes TIPS sound so much more sophisticated than it's going to be,"
says spokesperson Charles Miller. "This is still in development but
it's nothing more than something to make people more aware of what's going
on around them, and most people do that now anyway."
-
- Likewise, both the Federal Bureau of Investigations and
the Central Intelligence Agency denied roles in any sweeping algorithm
to measure citizens' potential terrorist leanings. If anything, the FBI
has recently been taken to task for being a tin-cans-and-string Luddite
organization. But the FBI is a client of the consumer data aggregator ChoicePoint.
And a U.S. official tells the Voice, "Can I categorically deny anybody
in government is doing it? No."
-
- An admission that the government is combing through purchase
records certainly would help explain why, according to the Naples Daily
News, federal agents reviewed the shopper-card transactions of hijacker
Mohammed Atta's crew to create a profile of ethnic tastes and terrorist
supermarket-shopping preferences.
-
- Algorithms are already used to search for things as diverse
as credit card fraud and ideal college applicants. Since 1998, airline
ticket buyers have been sifted at the reservations desk by the Computer
Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS, a net championed by Al
Gore and set to expand dramatically. The group overseeing the algorithm,
the Transportation Security Administration, won't comment on what new data
might be added to create CAPPS 2.
-
- "At a conceptual level, the work that these algorithms
do is not much different than the work that a detective undertakes in assessing
whether an individual is a suspect in a crime," explains Christy Joiner-Congleton,
CEO of Stone Analytics, a leading developer of such programs. "Good
algorithms sort through mountains of outcomes and possible contributing
factors and identify relationships for very rare events, like terrorism.
The more exotic the outcome, the more data is needed to discover it, and
the more sophisticated the algorithm must be to discover it."
-
- Academic mathematicians and statisticians who design
algorithms have also called for broader databases. Among them are Kafadar
and Max D. Morris of Iowa State University, co-authors of a new paper titled
"Data-Based Detection of Potential Terrorist Attacks on Airplanes."
They note that "[a]fter the fact, some common elements of the suspected
terrorists are obvious: None were U.S. citizens, all had lived in the U.S.
for some period of time, all had connections to a particular foreign country,
all had purchased one-way tickets at the gate with cash. The statistical
odds that five out of 80 revenue passengers (in the case of one of the
four hijacked flights on September 11) fit this profile might, by itself,
be unusual enough to warrant concern."
-
- Racial profiling finds quasi-acceptance in the hunt for
terrorists, as it does in the drug war or the pursuit of serial killers,
who tend to be middle-aged white men. But Kafadar and Morris argue that
the "historical data must be relevant to a specific flight. For example,
a United flight leaving San Francisco for Seoul, Korea, could be expected
to carry a much larger fraction of Asian passengers than one might see
on a flight from, say, Des Moines to Denver," the authors write. A
trip like Atta's, Kafadar tells the Voice, "wasn't a flight coming
from Saudi Arabia. There were a disproportionately high number of Arabic
names given about 80 people to choose from."
-
- But the algorithm method didn't fail on 9-11-the human
response did. When the screening program spotted something unusual about
at least one of the flights, the people in charge elected only to reinspect
the luggage. According to The Wall Street Journal, CAPPS tagged hijackers
Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Al-Midhar because they'd reserved their tickets
by credit card, but paid in cash. The right-wing National Review slammed
CAPPS for failing to include race, religion, and national origin in its
calculations or to tie the system into manual searches of passengers, and
not just baggage.
-
- MIT mathematician David R. Karger says harassing individuals
is foolhardy, but so is refusing to consider sensitive demographics. "This
is just making your predictive capability worse," he writes in an
e-mail interview. "Much more appropriate is to use the best data you've
got, but to remember that probability doesn't mean certainty."
-
- Joiner-Congleton writes, "Fundamentally, the algorithms
themselves (if created in a technically correct fashion) are not the thing
to fear. Rather, as in life, the things to fear are the conclusions drawn
and the subsequent actions taken. Nevertheless, drawing conclusions from
data is a necessary thing in life. People must do this to survive. Imagine
the havoc that would be wreaked on the roads of America if we ignored the
sounding of a horn on the freeway. Horn-blowing is usually associated with
a dangerous event. We ignore it at our peril."
-
- She even conceives of developing algorithms so advanced
that society might intervene, to get people liable to be recruited into
cells back on track before they can be seduced by elements like Al Qaeda.
"There is a possibility that with sufficient information about known
terrorists we could evolve to the point where we could spot terrorists
in the making," she argues. "We believe that individuals can
be at risk of becoming drug addicts, or joining gangs, or having affairs,
or any number of things at certain times and under certain conditions in
their lives. . . . Thorough and continued algorithmic investigation of
terrorist behavior is very likely to shed light on their origins, and possibly
lead to proactive efforts."
-
- But there's a truly slippery slope here. We live in a
nation that for months has held at least 700 people-and possibly hundreds
more-incommunicado, with no more solid connection to terrorism than that
they were born in Middle Eastern countries.
-
- Privacy may seem like a luxury in a nation at war, but
that moral concept lies at the heart of constitutionally guaranteed liberties.
That's why so many people are willing to fight for it. A lawsuit filed
by John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems, aims to restore
the anonymity central to the freedom to travel in America. He names Ashcroft,
FBI director Robert Mueller, and security czar Tom Ridge as defendants,
among other officials, along with two airlines. Gilmore wants to prevent
security at airports from demanding identification from him, or subjecting
him to arduous and invasive searches when he refuses to provide a photo
ID. The emphasis, he says, should be on strengthening cockpits and developing
"fly by wire" systems to automatically land planes under threat.
But our terrorism fears extend well past airlines to water-tainting, dirty
bombs, suicide bombers, conventional bombing, or even simply opening fire
with an assault weapon in Grand Central Station-the kinds of attacks that
are difficult to prevent in an open society.
-
- For now, we rely on tools like algorithms, and algorithms
make mistakes. Albrecht notes that in a three-month test period, the Department
of Defense investigated 345 employees after a program falsely fingered
them for abusing shopping privileges. In another case, an elderly woman
was repeatedly stopped and questioned in airports because her name matched
that of a young man already in prison for murder-a glitch that may indicate
CAPPS or another algorithm is using data illegally, for basic criminal
investigation and not anti-terrorism. Further, supermarket records have
been seized by Drug Enforcement Agency investigators looking for purchases
of small plastic baggies, often used in the drug trade, Albrecht observes.
-
- "I am not a number!" shouted Patrick McGoohan,
star of the British TV show The Prisoner, when he rejected life in an idyllic
village where he was held and constantly monitored. "I am a free man."
Now that this nation is at war with terror, perhaps you'll remain free
as long as your "Potential Terrorist Quotient" remains low enough.
-
-
- Read more of the Voice's coverage of the attack on civil
liberties in post-September 11 America.
- http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0230/baard.php
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