Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks’ malware checklist / Boing Boing
This is an excellent essay from Cory Doctorow on mass surveillance in the post-Snowden era, and the difference between HUMINT and SIGINT. So much good stuff, including this (new to me) cite for, “Goodhart’s law”, on secrecy as it affects adversarial classification:
The problem with this is that once you accept this framing, and note the happy coincidence that your paymasters just happen to have found a way to spy on everyone, the conclusion is obvious: just mine all of the data, from everyone to everyone, and use an algorithm to figure out who’s guilty. The bad guys have a Modus Operandi, as anyone who’s watched a cop show knows. Find the MO, turn it into a data fingerprint, and you can just sort the firehose’s output into ”terrorist-ish” and ”unterrorist-ish.” Once you accept this premise, then it’s equally obvious that the whole methodology has to be kept from scrutiny. If you’re depending on three ”tells” as indicators of terrorist planning, the terrorists will figure out how to plan their attacks without doing those three things. This even has a name: Goodhart’s law. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Google started out by gauging a web page’s importance by counting the number of links they could find to it. This worked well before they told people what they were doing. Once getting a page ranked by Google became important, unscrupulous people set up dummy sites (“link-farms”) with lots of links pointing at their pages.
(tags: adversarial-classification classification surveillance nsa gchq cory-doctorow privacy snooping goodharts-law google anti-spam filtering spying snowden)