Data

NSA Contractor Accused Of Stealing Sensitive Data

February 14, 2017 James Holbrooks, www.activistpost.com Educate! CIA, Data, NSA

By James Holbrooks for Activist Post - According to the Times, a neighbor saw “two dozen F.B.I. agents wearing military-style uniforms and armed with long guns” storm Martin’s home and later escort the man out in handcuffs. At the time, there was speculation that Martin could be connected to stolen N.S.A. code that found its way into the hands of a group called the Shadow Brokers — for a period, Martin worked for the elite N.S.A. unit from which the data was taken — but even now, authorities can’t prove he actually passed on any information. But the mere fact that he possessed such highly sensitive material is enough to put Martin away for the rest of his life, as the recently released indictment indicates.

Guerrilla Archivists Develop App To Save Science Data From Trump

February 12, 2017 Zoë Schlanger, www.qz.com Create! Data, Science

By Zoë Schlanger for Quartz. Enthusiasm for guerrilla archiving is skyrocketing; the day at NYU was the latest in a ballooning list of “data rescues” across the country. All-day archiving marathons have been held at Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Boston, and Michigan, and by the time the NYU event was over, attendees from several other cities had volunteered to host their own. The data rescue movement is growing up fast: What started as a project coordinated through group spreadsheets in Google Docs now has a workflow formalized through a custom-built app designed specifically for this purpose by O’Brien and Daniel Allan, a computational scientist at a national lab. Meanwhile, members of the Environmental Data & Government Initiative, a group of academics and developers that has been acting informally as a liaison between the DIY events, is working on something of a starter pack for people who want to host data rescues of their own, with advice and templates gleaned from lessons learned at earlier events. All this effort is partly to preserve federal science for researchers to use in the future—the participants are going through great lengths, spurred by the librarians in the crowd . . . .

How Big Data Becomes Psy Ops And Tilts World Towards Its Own Aims

February 4, 2017 Staff, www.educationalchemy.com Educate! Data, Education

By Staff of Education Alchemy - A psychologist named Michael Kosinski (see full report) from Cambridge developed a method to analyze Facebook members, using the cute little personality quizzes or games. What started as a fun experiment resulted with the largest data set combining psychometric scores with Facebook profiles ever to be collected. Dr. Kosinski is a leading expert in psychometrics, a data-driven sub-branch of psychology. His work is grounded on the Five Factors of Personality theory which include something called OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. So many people volunteered their personal information to play these games and take these quizzes that before long Kosinski had volumes of data...

What Can We Learn From 800,000 Comments On Net Neutrality?

September 5, 2014 Bob Lannon and Andrew Pendleton, www.sunlightfoundation.com Educate! Data, FCC, Internet Freedom, Net Neutrality

On Aug. 5, the Federal Communications Commission announced the bulk release of the comments from its largest-ever public comment collection. We've spent the last three weeks cleaning and preparing the data and leveraging our experience in machine learning and natural language processing to try and make sense of the hundreds-of-thousands of comments in the docket. Here is a high-level overview, as well as our cleaned version of the full corpus which is available for download in the hopes of making further research easier. Our first exploration uses natural language processing techniques to identify topical keywords within comments and use those keywords to group comments together. We analyzed a corpus of 800,959 comments. Some key findings: We estimate that less than 1 percent of comments were clearly opposed to net neutrality1. At least 60 percent of comments submitted were form letters written by organized campaigns (484,692 comments); while these make up the majority of comments, this is actually a lower percentage than is common for high-volume regulatory dockets. At least 200 comments came from law firms, on behalf of themselves or their clients. Below is an interactive visualization that lets you explore these groupings and view individual comments within the groups.

Report: Media Exaggerates Image Of Blacks As Criminals

August 29, 2014 Daniel Angster, Salvatore Colleluori, & Todd Gregory , www.mediamatters.org Educate! Crime, Data, New York (NY)

Coverage Of Cases Involving Black Suspects Outpaced Historical Arrest Rates From NYPD Statistics. In stories where race could be identified, the percentage of African-American suspects in murders, thefts, and assaults covered by WCBS, WNBC, WABC, and WNYW was well above the percentage of African-American suspects who have been arrested for those crimes in New York City. According to averages of arrest statistics from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for the past four years, African-American suspects were arrested in 54 percent of murders, 55 percent of thefts, and 49 percent of assaults. Meanwhile, over the past three months, the suspects in the four stations' coverage of murders were 68 percent African-American, the suspects in their coverage of thefts were 80 percent African-American, and the suspects in their coverage of assaults were 72 percent African-American. WABC Covered Crime The Most, While WNYW Covered It The Least. In the past three months, WABC reported on crime much more than the other three stations, with 154 suspects mentioned in its reports. The race of 98 of those suspects could be identified, 75 of whom were African-American. In contrast, WNYW mentioned only 38 suspects in its reports on crime. The race of 23 of those suspects could be identified, 19 of whom were African-American. WNBC aired the second-most coverage of crime, mentioning 105 suspects in its reports. The race of 82 of those suspects could be identified, 60 of whom were African-American. WCBS mentioned 80 suspects in its reports on crime. The race of 52 of those suspects could be identified, and 35 of them were African-American.

How The NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

August 26, 2014 Ryan Gallagher, www.firstlook.org Educate! Data, NSA, Privacy, Surveillance

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants. ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

Part IV, Data-Mining Tools To Track And Kill Activists

August 22, 2014 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, www.occupy.com Educate! Data, Drones, Surveillance

Since 2008, the year of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Defense has funded a multimillion dollar university research program to probe the complex dynamics of mass social and political movements, anticipate global trends, and ultimately augment the intelligence community’s preparations for civil unrest and insurgencies both abroad and at home. Part of that has involved developing advanced new data mining and analysis tools for the U.S. military intelligence community to pinpoint imminent and potential threats from individuals and groups. Among its many areas of focus are ongoing projects at Arizona State University (ASU) designed to enhance and automate the algorithms used by intelligence agencies like the NSA to analyze "open source" information from social media in order to track the potential threat-level to U.S. interests. Formal organizations and broad social networks as well as individuals could be identified and closely monitored with such tools to an unprecedented degree of precision. Loosely defined concepts of political “radicalism,” violence and nonviolence, as well as questionable research methodologies, open the way for widespread suspicion of even peaceful activist groups and their members, and the equation of them with potential terrorists. Civil society organizations in the U.K., including both Muslim religious groups and non-religious anti-war networks, have been prioritized for study to test and improve the effectiveness of these data-mining tools.

Data On Transfer Of Military Gear To Police

August 20, 2014 David Leonhardt, www.nytimes.com Educate! Data, Militarization, Police

Since President Obama took office, the Pentagon has transferred to police departments tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft. In May, The New York Times requested and received from the Pentagon its database of transfers since 2006. The data underpinned an article in June and helped inform coverage of the police response this month in Ferguson, Mo., after an officer shot Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager. The Times is now posting the raw data to GitHub here. With this data, which is being posted as it was received, people can see what gear is being used in their communities. The equipment is as varied as guns, computers and socks. The Pentagon-to-police transfer program is not new. Congress created it during the drug war, as a way to increase police firepower in the fight against drug gangs. But since 9/11, as the Pentagon geared up to fight two wars, then drew down as those wars ended, the amount of available military surplus has ballooned. Now, after a week of confrontation between protesters in Ferguson and heavily armed police, members of Congress are criticizing the trickle down of military gear.

Part II: DoD Data Mining To Track, Kill Activists

August 20, 2014 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, www.occupy.com Educate! Activism, Data, Politics, Violence

The Pentagon’s multimillion dollar Minerva research program to fund social science research for military applications includes a flagship project established in 2009 at Arizona State University (ASU) to examine “radical” and “counter-radical” Muslim movements in Southeast Asia, West Africa and Western Europe. The project’s "expert wisdom gathering tool," used by academics involved in the project to assess and rank the threat-level from organizations and civil society groups, set its sights on the UK, Germany, France, Europe generally, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. Although purportedly designed to assess Islamic movements, among the 36 UK organizations targeted for ranking on the tool’s "radicalization" scale are several non-Muslim activist groups critical of US, British and Israeli foreign policy. A deeper analysis of the criteria used by the project to label organizations discloses serious deficiencies that tend to cast suspicion of propensity for violence on any group calling for radical social, political or religious change. Conflating violent and nonviolent "radicalism" Explaining the rationale behind the Minerva initiative, program director Dr. Erin Fitzgerald said, “Decreasing terrorism and political violence requires an understanding of the underlying forces that shape motivations and mobilize action. The vast majority of political movements – even only those with seemingly ‘radical’ political philosophies – do not turn violent or destabilize regional security; we want to understand what makes those leading to armed conflict different.”

A Fascinating Look Inside Those 1.1 Million Open-Internet Comments

August 14, 2014 Elise Hu, www.npr.org Educate! Data, FCC, Internet Freedom, Net Neutrality

When the Federal Communications Commission asked for public comments about the issue of keeping the Internet free and open, . So huge, in fact, that the FCC's platform for receiving comments twice got knocked offline because of high traffic, and because of technical problems. So what's in those nearly 1.1 million public comments? A lot of mentions of , according to a TechCrunch analysis. But now, we have a fuller picture. The San Francisco data analysis firm Quid looked beyond keywords to find the sentiment and arguments in those public comments. Quid, as commissioned by the media and innovation funder Knight Foundation, parsed hundreds of thousands of comments, tweets and news coverage on the issue since January. The firm looked at where the comments came from and what common arguments emerged from them. You'll see here that every emergent theme was "pro" net neutrality, or supports the idea of a level playing field for content on the Internet. The comments did include "anti" net neutrality positions. They included statements opposing the "FCC's crippling new regulations," as commenters wrote. But they came from a form letter, or template, and all comment clusters that came from templates (five separate ones in all, four of five supporting net neutrality) were collapsed into a single node.

NSA Spying: Ordinary Americans Far Outnumber Targets

July 7, 2014 Barton Gellman, www.washingtonpost.com Educate! Data, NSA, Privacy, Surveillance

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents. The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

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