Paul Weinberg: December 2009 Archives

How do police forces make sense of all of their collected data?

The answer of course is the reliance on data mining technology via internal algorithms to analyze trends and connect the dots.

As I reported in my last blog, much of the data collected on citizens in the United States or North America is often not vetted for accuracy or even updated.

Lawyer Maureen Webb, elucidates further on this point in her seminal book, Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the post-9/11 World.

"None of the data mining programs contain a mechanism by which individuals can correct, contextualize or object to the information that is being used against them or even know what it is."

This kind of precision in data mining is not possible because systems operate on a "preemption principle," she explains. 

"They would be bogged down if they were held to the ordinary standards of access, accuracy and accountability."

Secondly, she writes, "data mining is assessing guilt by Goggle keyword searches" in its reliance on broad categories to find potential terrorists among targeted ethnic, religious and racial groups.

Meanwhile, Whit Andrews, an industry analyst at Gartner, says that the main customers for the variety of data mining software products on the market are very large government and private commercial organizations.

He notes that the data mining technology continues to improve but it is best used when the data is arranged in a linear fashion for simple searches as in "show me all of the records that contain X in the field data."

Commercial providers wanting an up to date analysis of sales and customer trends for products and services have benefited from data mining because the searches are generally straight forward, Andrews explains.

Where it gets complicated is in the more ambitious and perhaps nebulous searches of masses of data by police and intelligence to predict trends and avoid incidents of crime or terrorism.

The efforts can be "hair raising"for the analysts and the results are less than satisfactory in terms of the quality of the results, says Andrews.

A typical question that might come up in policing or intelligence may include the following: --"you want to find data on every person who has traveled from Toronto to New York City last year and who has also gone to Kabul.

The challenge is that you are looking for different items or objects such as for example a health record or an airline ticket to identify patterns of specific people targeted.

"The critical challenge in searching has been the number of relationships and the ability to reduce those relationships to something that an analyst can parse," says Andrews.

"But you might literally have thousands of relationships that need to be addressed. And then you need to make it possible for the analyst, to interpret whether those relationships are fulfilled," he continues.

Andrews experienced first hand having his name mysteriously put on a US government watch list where it stayed for two years. The result was that he was pulled over for questioning by authorities to a back room every time he tried to board a flight at an airport.

"I was on the watch list because my [original] name is Thomas Andrews," he recalled.

None of the authorities at the airport could explain to Andrews why he was being subjected to this level of scrutiny or if there was another Thomas Andrews wanted by the police.

"There is the possibility that someone had misused my name or that it was an extremely common name. Another [possibility] is that it had nothing to do with my name."

A chilling by-product of the over-reaction to 9/11 in Washington is the building of giant global electronic databases containing personal citizen information that in some cases includes hearsay which has not been properly verified or vetted.

The U.S. government's philosophy of so-called risk assessment is straight out of Kafka and Orwell's nightmares, writes lawyer Maureen Webb, the author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post 9/11 World.

"It is a world in which individuals are presumed guilty, detained and not told the charges against them, denied the right to face their accusers, denied the right to know the evidence against them and the criteria by which they are being judged, and given no recourse and no one to advocate for them."

Eight years later after the passage of the Patriot Act it is not clear if this enormously expensive project has caught many real terrorists. We know the government databases have mostly ensnarled innocent people at international borders and left behind permanent psychological and physical scars.

The most famous example is IT specialist and Canadian citizen Maher Arar who upon returning home from visiting his wife's relatives in Tunisia was stopped and held in New York City in 2002. Questioned but never charged, he ended up being sent to Syria, the country of his birth where he was jailed and tortured for almost a year on suspicions of terrorism -- that were found to be groundless by in an official inquiry in Canada by Judge Dennis O'Connor. Following that, in early 2007 Arar received an apology from the Canadian government - the original unproven accusations based on hearsay and guilt by association against him originated with Canadian police and security officials -- and was compensated to the tune of $10-million Canadian.

Unfortunately, Arar has never personally recovered from his ordeal. He cannot get a job in IT consulting in Canada which tends to demand a certain amount of travel all over North America.  Not helpful then was the Department of Homeland Security which has barred him from entering the US. No full explanation was provided by DHS secretary Janet Napolitano during her visit to Ottawa earlier this year.

Much of the personal information in the post 9/11 databases has not been confirmed and updated, comments, says Peter Manning, Northeastern University professor and author of Technology of Policing.

Currently, the giant databases in the US contain items like warrants and arrest records which are shared among the FBI, customs immigration officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

So, people with particular kinds of names -- usually Arabic sounding -- will continue to experience delays and possible incarceration while crossing international borders, Manning remarked.

One good thing he says is that the databases are incompatible with the municipal police computer systems, which limits their damage to the national and international level.

"The only way that it might work as it has always in the past is if someone from the Toronto Police Department knows somebody in the New York Police department. And the New York Police Department knows somebody in Homeland Security and says, 'can you get me some information.'"

Also, data mining continues to be an underdeveloped technology, That is, explains Manning, it is often difficult to do accurate searches of patterns and trends from the accumulated data in the giant data bases.

The problem, he says, is that in software, it is hard to match different objects, such as for example, as an airline ticket or a health record.

But ordinary citizen should not be complacent. Take a look at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics where a billion dollar plus security budget has managed to facilitate communication and data sharing via compatible technologies among national, local Vancouver city police and security and intelligence forces within Canada, as well as with neighboring US law enforcement authorities across the border.

"We also have risk assessment here in Canada and it is this risk assessment that is cranking out the data on relative risks to the Olympics," says Micheal Vonn, policy director at the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

The target is not terrorists who have fallen off the list of threats, but "protesters," says Vonn.

The Canadian media has reported on how potential critics of the Olympic Games among political activists, artists and journalists are being targeted under the new security blanket enveloping Vancouver.

Also recently affected was Amy Goodman, the award winning host of the Democracy Now radio show in the US. She was on her way to Vancouver to publicize her new book, Breaking the Sound Barrier and talk about health care reform and wars in Asia when she was stopped, questioned and searched by officials at the Canada Border Services Agency for 90 minutes, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Goodman revealed that Canadian border officials were worried about what she might write about in terms of the Vancouver Olympics When she revealed her ignorance about the upcoming sports event, they refused to believe her.

Goodman also mentioned to the CBC that her car was searched and the officials demanded to look at her notes and her computer. Eventually, she was permitted to enter and stay in Canada for only 48 hours

"I am deeply concerned that as a journalist I would be flagged and that the concern - the major concern - was the content of my speech," she told reporters.  The CBSA refused to comment on Goodman's statements.

Manning says that Canadian police have software technology that has solved some of the incompatibility technology challenges experienced by their US counterparts.

"Canadian police have been much more advanced with respect to these formalized modes of sharing data than American police," he noted.  [More on that in a follow-up]