J.G. Sandom's Blog

Here's a fascinating interview with neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. She argues that many of the key beliefs we have about emotions are wrong: for example, it’s not true that we all feel the same things; that anyone can “read” other people’s faces; and it’s not true that emotions are things that happen to us. This is especially relevant to me because Robin Beauvais, the protagonist of dEATH in dAVOS and of the book I'm working on now, mURDER in mACAU, has such a hard time reading faces that she creates an Encyclopedia of Facial Expressions for herself to help her untangle what the people around her are thinking. On the surface, you might think that Robin is somewhere on the spectrum. You might think that . . . but you'd be wrong. There are other things at work within the psyche of Robin Beauvais, things that I only just begin to touch on in mURDER in mACAU. Interested in learning more? Check out this article from The Verge.

 

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains how emotions are made

We don’t all make the same expressions when we’re sad

by Angela Chen 

I am known for being hard to read, to the point that friends complain that they can never tell what I’m thinking by looking at my face. But, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, it’s possible that they might remain confused even if my face were more expressive.

Barrett, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, is the author of How Emotions Are Made. She argues that many of the key beliefs we have about emotions are wrong. It’s not true that we all feel the same things, that anyone can “read” other people’s faces, and it’s not true that emotions are things that happen to us.

The Verge spoke to Barrett about her new view of emotion, what this means for emotion-prediction startups, and whether we can feel an emotion if we don’t have the word for it.

Th is interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

You argue that emotions are constructed by our brains. How does that differ from what we knew before?

The classical view assumes that emotions happen to you. Something happens, neurons get triggered, and you make these stereotypical expressions you can’t control. It says that people scowl when they’re angry and pout when they’re sad, that everyone around the world not only makes the same expressions, but that you’re born with the capacity to recognize them automatically.

In my view, a face doesn’t speak for itself when it comes to emotion, ever. I’m not saying that when your brain constructs a strong feeling that there are no physical cues to the strength of your feeling. People do smile when they’re happy or scowl when they’re sad. What I’m saying is that there’s not a single obligatory expression. And emotions aren’t some objective thing, they’re learned and something that our brains construct.

You write about studies where you show someone a face and ask them to identify the emotions, and people consistently get it wrong, like confusing fear with anxiety. But fear and anxiety seem pretty similar to me. Do people also confuse emotions that are really far apart, like happiness and guilt?

It’s interesting that you say that guilt and happiness are far apart. I often show people a picture of the top half of my daughter’s face and people say she looks sad or guilty or deflated, and then I show the whole image and and she’s actually in a full-blown episode of pleasure because she’s at a chocolate museum.

If you were to pit a face against anything else, it will always lose. If you show a face on its own, versus if you pair it with a voice or a body posture or a scenario, the face is very ambiguous in its meaning. There are studies where they actually took people’s whole faces but removed the bodies. People were expressing negativity or positivity, and people mistake all the time without the context. When you take a super positive face and stick it in a negative situation, people experience the face as more negative. They don’t just interpret the face as negative, they actually change how they look at the face when you use eye-tracking software.

The expressions that we’ve been told are the correct ones are just stereotypes and people express in many different ways.

What about things like resting bitch face? That’s a topic you hear about a lot —where people say that they can “tell” someone is a bitch, but women protest that their face is “just that like.”

We’ve done research on this and resting bitch face is a neutral face. When you look at it structurally, there’s nothing negative in the face. People are using the context or their knowledge about that person to see more negativity in the face.

I’m curious what all this means for affective computing, or the startups that try to analyze your facial expression to figure out how you’re feeling. Does this mean their research is futile?

As they are currently pursuing it, most companies are going to fail. If people use the classical view to guide the development of their technology — if you’re trying to build software or technology to identify scowls or frowns and pouts and so on and assume that means anger, good luck.

But if affective computing and other technology in this area were adjusted slightly in their goals, they hold the potential to revolutionize the science of emotion. We need to be able to track people’s movements accurately, and it would be so helpful to measure their movements and as much of the external and internal context as possible.

So we know that emotions don’t have a universal look. Can you explain more about your argument that emotions are constructed? My understanding is that your claim is like this: you have a basic feeling — like “pleasant” or “unpleasant”— and bodily sensations, which are sometimes triggered by the environment. Then we interpret those feelings and physical sensations as certain emotions, like rage or guilt. How does this work?

All brains evolved for the purposes of regulating the body. Any brain has to make decisions about what to invest its resources in: what am I going to spend, and what kind of reward am I going to get? Your brain is always regulating and it’s always predicting what the sensations from your body are to try to figure out how much energy to expend.

When those sensations are very intense, we typically use emotion concepts to make sense of those sensory inputs. We construct emotions.

Let’s back up a bit. What are emotion concepts?

It’s just what you know about emotion — not necessarily what you can describe but what your brain knows to do and the feelings that come from that knowledge. When you’re driving, your brain knows how to do a bunch of things automatically, but you don’t need to articulate it or even be aware of it as you’re doing it to successfully drive.

When you known an emotion concept, you can feel that emotion. In our culture we have “sadness,” in Tahitian culture they don’t have that. Instead they have a word whose closest translation would be “the kind of fatigue you feel when you have the flu.” It’s not the equivalent of sadness, that’s what they feel in situations where we would feel sad.

Where do we learn those concepts?

At the earliest stage, we are taught these concepts by our parents.

You don’t have to teach children to have feelings. Babies can feel distress, they can feel pleasure and they do, they can certainly be aroused or calm. But emotion concepts — like sadness when something bad happens — are taught to children, not always explicitly. And that doesn’t stop in childhood either. Your brain has the capacity to combine past experience in novel ways to create new representations, experience something new that you’ve never seen or heard or felt before.

I’m fascinated by the link between language and emotion. Are you saying that if we don’t have a word for an emotion, we can’t feel it?

Here’s an example: you probably had experienced schadenfreude without knowing the word, but your brain would have to work really hard to construct those concepts and make those emotions. You would take a long time to describe it.

But if you know the word, if you hear the word often, then it becomes much more automatic, just like driving a car. It gets triggered more easily and you can feel it more easily. And in fact that’s how schadenfreude feels to most Americans because they have a word they’ve used a lot. It can be conjured up very quickly.

Does understanding that emotions are constructed help us control them?

It’s never going to be the case that it’s effortless and never the case that you can snap your fingers and just change how you feel.

But learning new emotions words is good because you can learn to feel more subtle emotions, and that makes you better at regulating your emotions. For example, you can learn to distinguish between distress and discomfort. This is partly why mindfulness meditation is so useful to people who have chronic pain — it lets you separate out the physical discomfort from the distress.

I think understanding how emotions are constructed widens the horizon of control. You realize that if your brain is using your past to construct your present, you can invest energy in the present to cultivate new experiences that then become the seeds for your future. You can cultivate or curate experiences in the now and then they become, if you practice them, they become automated enough that your brain will automatically construct them in the future.

Laptop searches on U.S. borders have risen precipitously over the past two years, from a total of 5,000 searches in 2015 to 25,000 in 2016, and rising to 5,000 in the month of February 2017 alone. To see where your liberties are about to be infringed, look to the edges, literally, in this case — U.S. borders. If U.S. authorities are eager to to intrude on our privacy to such an egregious degree on our borders, can our general liberties be far behind? I cover these issues at great length in my latest two novels, the techno-thriller 4o4 - A John Decker Thriller, about the surveillance state, recently listed as a Top Ten Amazon Bestseller in Technothrillers, as well as my latest book, dEATH in dAVOS, about a teen serial killer and hacker of Haitian descent who gets herself invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, ostensibly because of an app she's developed, though in reality to take out nefarious billionaires who have committed unspeakable crimes but whose great wealth and power insulates them from prosecution and punishment. For more on this topic, check out this article from The Intercept.

LAWSUIT SEEKS TRANSPARENCY AS SEARCHES OF CELLPHONES AND LAPTOPS SKYROCKET AT BORDERS

Murtaza Hussain

A LAWSUIT FILED today by the Knight First Amendment Institute, a public interest legal organization based at Columbia University, seeks to shed light on invasive searches of laptops and cellphones by Customs and Border Protection officers at U.S. border crossings.

Documents filed in the case note that these searches have risen precipitously over the past two years, from a total of 5,000 searches in 2015 to 25,000 in 2016, and rising to 5,000 in the month of February 2017 alone. Among other questions, the lawsuit seeks to compel the federal government to provide more information about these searches, including how many of those searched have been U.S. citizens, the number of searches by port of entry, and the number of searches by the country of origin of the travelers.

Civil rights groups have long claimed that warrantless searches of cellphones and laptops by government agents constitute a serious invasion of privacy, due to the wealth of personal data often held on such devices. It is common for private conversations, photographs, and location information to be held on cellphones and laptops, making a search of these items significantly more intrusive than searching a simple piece of luggage.

A number of recent cases in the media have revealed instances of U.S. citizens and others being compelled by CBP agents to unlock their devices for search. In some instances, people have claimed to have been physically coerced into complying, including one American citizen who said that CBP agents grabbed him by the neck in order to take his cellphone out of his possession.

The legality of warrantless device searches at the border remains a contested issue, with the government asserting, over the objections of civil liberties groups, that Fourth Amendment protections do not apply at ports of entry. Some particularly controversial cases of searches at the border have involved journalists whose electronic data contains sensitive information about the identity of sources. Last year, a Canadian journalist was detained for six hours before being denied entry to the United States after refusing to unlock devices containing sensitive information. It has also been alleged that border agents are disproportionately targeting Muslim Americans and people with ties to Muslim-majority countries for both interrogation and device searches.

This February, Sen. Ron Wyden sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security head John Kelly stating that he was “alarmed by recent media reports of Americans being detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and pressured to give CBP access … to locked mobile devices.” Wyden’s letter also indicated plans for legislation that would require agents to obtain a warrant before conducting these searches.

The rapidly growing number of searches has prompted a legal effort to demand constraints and controls on the practice. In a press release issued today announcing the lawsuit, the Knight First Amendment Institute indicated more plans to scrutinize these searches in the future.

“These searches are extremely intrusive, and government agents shouldn’t be conducting them without cause,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. “Putting this kind of unfettered power in the hands of border agents invites abuse and discrimination and will inevitably have a chilling effect on the freedoms of speech and association.”

Yet another attempt by government to undermine encryption in order to protect their ability to spy on its own citizenry. What government fails to understand is that any backdoors available to them will, eventually, be available to cyber-thieves and other hackers. I cover these issues at great length in my latest two novels, the techno-thriller 4o4 - A John Decker Thriller, about the surveillance state, recently listed as a Top Ten Amazon Bestseller in Technothrillers, as well as my latest book, dEATH in dAVOS, about a teen serial killer and hacker of Haitian descent who gets herself invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, ostensibly because of an app she's developed, though in reality to take out nefarious billionaires who have committed unspeakable crimes but whose great wealth and power insulates them from prosecution and punishment. For more on this topic, check out this article from Mashable.

 

 





The UK wants there to be 'no place for terrorists to hide,' including on WhatsApp

 

BY ARIEL BOGLE

The UK government wants there to be "no place for terrorists to hide," and that includes on encrypted messaging services. The company first on its agenda? WhatsApp.

Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Home Secretary Amber Rudd called for companies that provide secure communication apps to work with law enforcement.

"We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don't provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other," she said. 

"It used to be that people would steam open envelopes or listen in on phones when they wanted to find out what people were doing, legally, through warrantry [sic]. But in this situation, we need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted WhatsApp."

Rudd's comment came after media reports on Sunday that the Westminster Bridge attacker had sent a WhatsApp message prior to the incident that cannot be accessed because it was encrypted.

Fifty-two-year-old Briton Khalid Masood used a car and a knife to carry out an attack in the heart of London on Wednesday that left four people dead. He was killed by law enforcement on the scene.

Rudd said she was not arguing for the government to access all messages on such platforms. Instead, she wants encrypted services to recognise they have a responsibility to engage with law enforcement agencies to counter terrorism.

"They cannot get away with saying 'we are a different situation,'" she said. "They are not."

A WhatsApp spokesperson said the company was horrified at the London attack, adding that it is "cooperating with law enforcement as they continue their investigations."

The most famous case so far has been Apple's tussle with the FBI. In 2016, the security service took on the Silicon Valley giant in an attempt to bypass the lock screen of the iPhone 5C used by San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook. 

Farook and his wife killed 14 people and wounded 22 more in San Bernardino, California in Dec., 2015.

The U.S. Justice Department obtained a court order ordering Apple to assist the FBI in bypassing the phone's security, fearing that too many attempts to guess the passcode would wipe the phone's memory.

Warning that the FBI was seeking a "dangerous power," Apple fought the order, and ultimately the FBI managed to use an undisclosed technique to access the smartphone in question.

Security experts warn that building a backdoor into the iPhone or services like WhatAspp would compromise the safety of users in unintended ways: If UK police can somehow read encrypted messages, for example, what's to prevent law enforcement in countries with a poor human rights record from demanding the same level of access?

The UK-based digital rights advocate Open Rights Group has warned that undermining encryption would make ordinary internet activities more vulnerable.

"Compelling companies to put backdoors into encrypted services would make millions of ordinary people less secure online," the group's executive director, Jim Killock, said in a statement. "We all rely on encryption to protect our ability to communicate, shop and bank safely."

The UK already has extensive laws allowing the government access to the internet footprint of its citizens. 

In late 2016, it passed the Investigatory Powers Act, also known as the Snoopers' Charter. The bill creates a quasi-internet history database that's accessible to law enforcement upon request, among other measures.

The rhetoric on Sunday highlighted a clash between digital privacy and national security that has been playing out globally in recent years.

It's practically impossible for even the experts to determine who leaked what. That's why efforts to pin the hacks of DNC servers on Russian officials is basically a fool's errand. This story in the Intercept offers a fascinating glimpse at the latest leak of CIA materials released through Wikileaks, and how attribution is an inexact science at best. I cover these issues at great length in my latest two novels, the techno-thriller 4o4 - A John Decker Thriller, about the surveillance state, recently listed as a Top Ten Amazon Bestseller in Technothrillers, as well as my latest book, dEATH in dAVOS, about a teen serial killer and hacker of Haitian descent who gets herself invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, ostensibly because of an app she's developed, though in reality to take out nefarious billionaires who have committed unspeakable crimes but whose great wealth and power insulates them from prosecution and punishment. For more on this topic, check out this article from The Intercept.

WIKILEAKS FILES SHOW THE CIA REPURPOSING HACKING CODE TO SAVE TIME, NOT TO FRAME RUSSIA

Kim Zetter

ATTRIBUTING HACKING ATTACKS to the correct perpetrators is notoriously difficult. Even the U.S. government, for all its technical resources and expertise, took warranted criticism for trying to pin a high-profile 2014 cyberattack on North Korea, and more recently faced skepticism when it blamed Russia for hacks against top Democrats during the 2016 election.

In those cases, government officials said they based their attribution in part on software tools the hackers employed, which had been used in other cyberattacks linked to North Korea and Russia. But that sort of evidence is not conclusive; hackers have been known to intentionally use or leave behind software and other distinctive material linked to other groups as part of so-called false flag operations intended to falsely implicate other parties. Researchers at Russian digital security firm Kaspersky Lab have documented such cases.

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks published a large cache of CIA documents that it said showed the agency had equipped itself to run its own false-flag hacking operations. The documents describe an internal CIA group called UMBRAGE that WikiLeaks said was stealing the techniques of other nation-state hackers to trick forensic investigators into falsely attributing CIA attacks to those actors. According to WikiLeaks, among those from whom the CIA has stolen techniques is the Russian Federation, suggesting the CIA is conducting attacks to intentionally mislead investigators into attributing them to Vladimir Putin.

“With UMBRAGE and related projects, the CIA can not only increase its total number of attack types, but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints’ of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from,” WikiLeaks writes in a summary of its CIA document dump.

It’s a claim that seems intended to shed doubt on the U.S. government’s attribution of Russia in the DNC hack; the Russian Federation was the only nation specifically named by WikiLeaks as a potential victim of misdirected attribution. It’s also a claim that some media outlets have accepted and repeated without question.

“WikiLeaks said there’s an entire department within the CIA whose job it is to ‘misdirect attribution by leaving behind the fingerprints’ of others, such as hackers in Russia,” CNN reported without caveats.

It would be possible to leave such fingerprints if the CIA were reusing unique source code written by other actors to intentionally implicate them in CIA hacks, but the published CIA documents don’t say this. Instead, they indicate the UMBRAGE group is doing something much less nefarious.

They say UMBRAGE is borrowing hacking “techniques” developed or used by other actors to use in CIA hacking projects. This is intended to save the CIA time and energy by copying methods already proven successful. If the CIA were actually reusing source code unique to a specific hacking group, this could lead forensic investigators to misattribute CIA attacks to the original creators of the code. But the documents appear to say the UMBRAGE group is writing snippets of code that mimic the functionality of other hacking tools and placing it in a library for CIA developers to draw on when designing custom CIA tools.

“The goal of this repository is to provide functional code snippets that can be rapidly combined into custom solutions,” notes a document in the cache that discusses the project. “Rather than building feature-rich tools, which are often costly and can have significant CI value, this effort focuses on developing smaller and more targeted solutions built to operational specifications.”

Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security, agrees that the CIA documents are not talking about framing Russia or other nations.

“What we can conclusively say from the evidence in the documents is that they’re creating snippets of code for use in other projects and they’re reusing methods in code that they find on the internet,” he told The Intercept. “Elsewhere they talk about obscuring attacks so you can’t see where it’s coming from, but there’s no concrete plan to do a false flag operation. They’re not trying to say, ‘We’re going to make this look like Russia.’”

The UMBRAGE documents do mention looking at source code, but these reference widely available source code for popular tools, not source code unique to, say, Russian Federation hackers. And the purpose of examining the source code seems to be for purposes of inspiring the CIA code developers in developing their code, not so they can copy/paste it into CIA tools.

It’s not unusual for attackers of all persuasion — nation-state and criminal — to copy the techniques of other hackers. Success breeds success. A month after Stuxnet was discovered in June 2010, someone created a copycat exploit to attack the same Windows vulnerability Stuxnet exploited.

Components the UMBRAGE project has borrowed from include keyloggers; tools for capturing passwords and webcam imagery; data-destruction tools; components for gaining escalated privileges on a machine and maintaining stealth and persistent presence; and tools for bypassing anti-virus detection.

Some of the techniques UMBRAGE has borrowed come from commercially available tools. The documents mention Dark Comet, a well-known remote access trojan, or RAT, which can capture screenshots and keystrokes and grab webcam imagery, among other things. The French programmer who created Dark Comet stopped distributing it after stories emerged that the Syrian government was using it to spy on dissidents. Another tool UMBRAGE highlights is RawDisk, a tool made by the commercial software company Eldos, which contains drivers that system administrators can use to securely delete information from hard drives.

But legitimate tools are often used by hackers for illegitimate purposes, and RawDisk is no different. It played a starring role in the Sony hack in 2014, where the attackers used it to wipe data from Sony’s servers.

It was partly the use of RawDisk that led forensic investigators to attribute the Sony hack to North Korea. That’s because RawDisk had been previously used in 2011 “Dark Seoul” hack attacks that wiped the hard drives and master boot records of three banks and two media companies in South Korea. South Korea blamed the attack on North Korea and China. But RawDisk was also used in the destructive Shamoon attack in 2012 that wiped data from 30,000 systems at Saudi Aramco. That attack wasn’t attributed to North Korea, however; instead U.S. officials attributed it to Iran.

All of this highlights how murky attribution can be, particularly when focused only on the tools or techniques a group uses, and how the CIA is not doing anything different than other groups in borrowing tools and techniques.

“Everything they’re referencing [in the CIA documents] is extremely public code, which means the Russians are grabbing the same snippets and the Chinese are grabbing them and the U.S. is grabbing,” says Graham. “So they’re all grabbing the same snippets of code and then they’re making their changes to it.”

The CIA documents do talk elsewhere about using techniques to thwart forensic investigators and make it hard to attribute attacks and tools to the CIA. But the methods discussed are simply proper operational security techniques that any nation-state attackers would be expected to use in covert operations they don’t want attributed to them. The Intercept wasn’t able to find documents within the WikiLeaks cache that talk about tricking forensic investigators into attributing attacks to Russia. Instead, they discuss do’s and don’ts of tradecraft, such as encrypting strings and configuration data in malware to prevent someone from reverse engineering the code, or removing file compilation timestamps to prevent investigators from making correlations between compilation times and the working hours of CIA hackers in the U.S.

Researchers at anti-virus firms often use compilation times to determine where a malware’s creators might be located geographically if their files are consistently compiled during work hours that are distinctive to a region. For example, tools believed to have been created in Israel have shown compilation times on Sunday, which is a normal workday in Israel.

The bottom line with the CIA data dump released by WikiLeaks is that journalists and others should take care to examine statements made around it to ensure that they’re reporting accurately on the contents.

Here's a great clip from The Young Turk's where Cenk talks about the latest Wikileaks revelations. Looks like the CIA is doing a whole lof of domestic, NSA-type spying, which is prohibited by its charter and, as Cenk points out, duplicative of the illegal spying the NSA is already doing. So, not only is the CIA performing illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, it's wasting our money doing so! Hey, your TV is watching you! Could it get any more Orwellian than that? This is exactly the kind of government behavior that I cover in my two most recent novels, the techno-thriller 4o4 - A John Decker Thriller, about the surveillance state, recently listed as a Top Ten Amazon Bestseller in Technothrillers, as well as my latest book, dEATH in dAVOS, about a teen serial killer of Haitian descent who gets herself invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, ostensibly because of an app she's developed, though in reality to take out nefarious billionaires who have committed unspeakable crimes but whose great wealth and power insulates them from prosecution and punishment...but not from young Robin Beauvais.

If I saw this thing coming toward me, I'd poop my pants. The security industry is changing by the second. Can you imagine these robots protecting the DAPL pipeline? They soon will be. And then what will peaceful protestors do? These are exactly the issues I cover in my recent novel, 4o4 - A John Decker Thriller, about the surveillance state, recently listed as a Top Ten Amazon Bestseller in Technothrillers.

Handle is a research robot that stands 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4​ ​feet vertically. ​It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge. ​​​Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles​ found in the quadruped and biped robots Boston Dynamic builds, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds.

 

Here's another frightening story about how Peter Thiel's Palantir is enabling President Drumpf's era of mass deportation. Notice how Palantir is leveraging our own use of social media to spy on us. In the case of immigrants, this is helping Palantir identify where possible suspects are (e.g. a wedding or party), so that ICE agents can go there and detain them. This use of social media to plan arrests is exactly the kind of government behavior that I cover in my two most recent novels, the techno-thriller 4o4 - A John Decker Thriller, about the surveillance state, recently listed as a Top Ten Amazon Bestseller in Technothrillers, as well as my latest book, dEATH in dAVOS, about a teen serial killer of Haitian descent who gets herself invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, ostensibly because of an app she's developed, though in reality to take out nefarious billionaires who have committed unspeakable crimes but whose great wealth and power insulates them from prosecution and punishment...but not from young Robin Beauvais. For more on this topic, check out this article from The Intercept.

PALANTIR PROVIDES THE ENGINE FOR DONALD TRUMP’S DEPORTATION MACHINE



Spencer Woodman

IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT is deploying a new intelligence system called Investigative Case Management (ICM), created by Palantir Technologies, that will assist in President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport millions of immigrants from the United States.

In 2014, ICE awarded Palantir, the $20 billion data-mining firm founded by billionaire Trump advisor Peter Thiel, a $41 million contract to build and maintain ICM, according to government funding records. The system is scheduled to arrive at “final operating capacity” by September of this year. The documents identify Palantir’s ICM as “mission critical” to ICE, meaning that the agency will not be able to properly function without the program.

ICM funding documents analyzed by The Intercept make clear that the system is far from a passive administrator of ICE’s case flow. ICM allows ICE agents to access a vast “ecosystem” of data to facilitate immigration officials in both discovering targets and then creating and administering cases against them. The system provides its users access to intelligence platforms maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and an array of other federal and private law enforcement entities. It can provide ICE agents access to information on a subject’s schooling, family relationships, employment information, phone records, immigration history, foreign exchange program status, personal connections, biometric traits, criminal records, and home and work addresses.

“What we have here is a growing network of interconnected databases that together are drawing in more and more information,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If President Trump’s rhetoric on mass deportations is going to be turned into reality, then we’re going to see these tools turned in that direction, and these documents show that there are very powerful and intrusive tools that can be used toward that end.”

Although ICM appears to have been originally conceived for use by ICE’s office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the system appears to be widely available to agents within ICE. Officers of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO) — the U.S. government’s primary deportation force — access the system to gather information for both criminal and civil cases against immigrants, according to a June 2016 disclosure by the Department of Homeland Security, although ERO will use a separate system to manage its civil cases. “HSI and ERO personnel use the information in ICM to document and inform their criminal investigative activities and to support the criminal prosecutions arising from those investigations,” states the DHS filing. “ERO also uses ICM data to inform its civil cases.”

ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor also uses ICM to represent the office in “exclusion, deportation, and removal proceedings,” among other matters, according to the DHS disclosure.

The DHS disclosure states that Homeland Security Investigations is ICM’s primary user. Although mainly tasked with investigating serious cross-border crimes like drug smuggling, human trafficking, and child pornography, HSI had also been behind some of the most controversial workplace immigration raids of the Obama administration, which immigrant advocates fear could expand massively under President Trump. HSI provided support to the Enforcement and Removal Office during last month’s high-profile enforcement surge, and just last week it was reported that HSI agents spearheaded a controversial sweep of several Asian restaurants in Mississippi that led to the agency apprehending more than 50 immigrants.

The ICM documents offer a detailed reminder of the Obama-era push to upgrade and expand the federal government’s tools to track and deport immigrants. Obama not only presided over an unprecedented number of deportations; his administration also oversaw the pronounced expansion of intelligence systems aimed at the country’s immigrants. Now the sprawling immigrant surveillance apparatus that Obama enhanced is squarely in the hands of Donald Trump to assist in carrying out his promise to rapidly deport millions of immigrants.

A slide from a 2014 Immigration and Customs Enforcement document outlining capabilities required by the agency’s proposed Investigative Case Management system.

The ICM documents also underscore the prominent role Palantir will likely play in assisting ICE in this mission.

Notably, two of the primary intelligence systems that ICM relies upon have also been also built or supported by Peter Thiel’s firm, according to the funding documents. One of these is ICE’s FALCON system, a database and analytical platform built by Palantir that HSI agents can use to track immigrants and crunch data on forms of cross-border criminal activity. According to the documents, ICM also provides its users access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s “Analytical Framework for Intelligence,” or AFI, a vast yet little-understood data system that Palantir played a largely secret-role in supporting. Some privacy advocates believe that AFI could be used to fuel Trump’s “extreme vetting” of those seeking to enter the country.

A slide from a 2014 ICE funding document outlining required data flows for the agency’s modernized Investigative Case Management system.

“When Trump uses the term ‘extreme vetting’, AFI is the black-box system of profiling algorithms that he’s talking about,” Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project, a civil liberties initiative, told me last year. “This is what extreme vetting means.”

ICM also provides its users with access to an internal system called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), which “includes biographic and immigration status data related to individuals who are temporarily admitted to the United States as students or exchange visitors,” according to the DHS. Agents using ICM can also query ACRIMe, an extensive database operated by ERO that compiles data on immigrants in the United States. In addition, the funding documents state that ICM provides agents — through AFI — access to data gathered under the controversial National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, the now-defunct Bush-era system requiring visa-holders from two-dozen predominately Muslim countries and North Korea to register with the federal government.

One funding document states that ICM provides agents with the ability to simultaneously search information on a given person across a diverse range of government databases, permitting, for an example, an address search to query “multiple documents throughout the system, such as the person subject record, financial data (interface), CBP crossing data (interface), and other HSI and CBP subject record types. The user shall be able to conduct a consolidated address search that will match on all addresses regardless of the record type.”

Although ICE’s enforcement focuses overwhelmingly on immigrants, the ICM funding documents make clear the intelligence tool can also be aimed at U.S. citizens. “Citizenship can be established a variety of ways to include biographical and biometric system checks,” one document states. “U.S. Citizens are still subject to criminal prosecution and thus are a part of ICM.”

The scope of ICM’s use appears to have expanded during the system’s development. The hundreds of pages of funding documents from 2014 make no mention whatsoever of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO). On the contrary, the 2014 records state that ICM was launched as primarily an HSI initiative and meant for use by HSI agents. Yet by June of last year, this appears to have changed: The recent DHS privacy disclosure repeatedly states that ERO uses ICM to support aspects of its mission.

This is not the only case in which it has remained unclear what kind of limits ICE has on the sorts of missions for which its intelligence systems can be used.

A spokesperson for Palantir declined to provide comment for this story. ICE did not respond to a list of questions, including whether FALCON — ICE’s advanced intelligence and analytics system for Homeland Security Investigations — is also made available to ERO agents.

In February, ICE responded to a Freedom of Information Act Request asking for internal rules or restrictions on FALCON’s use by stating that no such documents existed, although ICE’s response also indicated the agency may have conducted an incomplete search for the records. The 2014 funding records indicate that ERO’s use of ICM — which provides its users access to Palantir’s FALCON — might also grant the deportation force access to FALCON.

Data sharing between federal agencies is often not governed by concrete legal regulations, according to Anil Kalhan, a professor at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law.

“Legislation after 9/11 authorized and encouraged information sharing within the executive branch,” Kalhan told the Intercept in December. “There is general authorization, and the scope and limits and constraints upon that authorization have not really been spelled out.”

The ICM documents appear to contain information about FALCON that is not otherwise publicly available. One funding document states that FALCON — and thus ICM — can link to a controversial law enforcement database called Black Asphalt, which is maintained by a private firm called Desert Snow and provides information to help police engage in civil and criminal asset forfeiture. Iowa and Kansas have prohibited the use of Black Asphalt by law enforcement agencies because of concerns that it “might not be a legal law enforcement tool,” according to the Washington Post. The funding documents also state that FALCON includes access to services provided by Cellebrite, an Israeli company that specializes in software used to breach cellphones.

With its full deployment arriving just in time for the Trump transition, ICM appears well positioned to respond to a new set of demands being placed on ICE by a president elected on promises of deporting immigrants en masse. The agency stipulated that Palantir must build a tool that can handle “no less than 10,000 users accessing the system at the same time” to search tens of millions of subject records.

A slide from a 2014 ICE funding document illustrating a day in the life of a Homeland Security Investigations special agent.

On May 8, 2014, in a meeting with representatives of firms vying to win the ICM contract, ICE screened a slide presentation to show just how ICM’s many users will be able to utilize the ICM system. The slides lay out a hypothetical scenario in which an ICE agent uses ICM to both interrogate a suspect at the border and then to shepherd the suspect’s case through court proceedings.

The first slide tells of a man named Jim Doe who attempted to enter the country by car but was stopped by CBP at the border and was discovered to be carrying contraband. So CBP calls in a square-jawed ICE HSI investigator, who immediately opens ICM and queries its data. This produces records on Doe’s vehicle, business dealings, prior arrests, and records detailing his prior crossings of the border.

Armed with this intelligence, the HSI agent then interrogates Doe and learns that he had brought the contraband across the border at the behest of a man Doe knows only by the nickname “Caliber,” who also has detailed discoverable information in ICM, which is able to reveal his true name of Calvin Clark by making connections based on a tattoo of Clark’s that is included in the system’s data.

Once the ICE agent has completed his ICM-backed investigation, he then uses ICM to create a case file. A subsequent chart shows the apparent final stage of ICM’s cradle-to-grave services represented in a graphic of a person clutching to prison bars with a caption reading: “justice is served.”

But the following slide points out that a conviction is not in fact the final step in ICM’s intelligence life cycle.

“Even once the case is closed,” the document states of the ICM record, “it is available for other agents to discover and link to future investigations, continuing the investigative cycle.”

Here's a fascinating story from Europe where mobile networks will soon be helping "drone" operators drive long-haul "driverless" trucks around Europe. Both of my novels 4o4 - A John Decker Thriller and dEATH in dAVOS feature scenes where cars are hijacked and used to kill. The scene in dEATH in dAVOS is particularly creepy:

Does it make me a bad person that I engineered my victory in an international competition, created a health app that won all kinds of awards and saved lives, just so I could arrange to have myself sent as a student observer and journalist to Davos in order to kill that despicable man?

Or does it just make me a good planner?

Kick, push, glide. Kick, push, glide.

I came up over the rise and the Flüelatal valley stretched out before me, white pine hugging the mountains, winding bern in the center. I could see mile after mile along Route 28. I reached back behind me unconsciously for my rifle but I didn’t have it with me. Not this time. Just the telescopic site that I plucked from my jacket and, with it, the stillness of the cold winter air, the impenetrable silence.

I raised the site and put it to my right eye, tapped the arm of my Glass, taking in the white vista, the trees heavy with snow, the dark smudge of the road, like a track of eyeliner, and then Juan Castillo’s blue Lamborghini Zagato as it flew around that bend, the hairpin, flew around it and finally let go of the earth, flattening the rail as if it were nothing and tumbled down the side of the mountain, rolling over and over in the heavy wet snow until it crashed into a farrago of boulders and burst into brilliant blue flames.

And here is the fascinating story from Automotive News Europe:

by Andres Gonzalez

BARCELONA -- The brave new world of remote-controlled cars is now technically possible using wireless technologies which are set to be commonplace early in the next decade, two major telecoms companies said at a test drive staged on Monday during an industry conference in Barcelona.

Spanish networks operator Telefonica joined forces with Swedish network equipment maker Ericsson to demonstrate how a car could be remotely controlled around obstacles on a test track located 70 kilometres away in Tarragona using wireless networks.

The driver of the vehicle took the wheel from the floor of the Fira conference centre in Barcelona, on the first day of the Mobile World Congress, Europe's biggest annual industry gathering.

The remote test drive relied on the latest mobile networks which are controlled in the cloud and are capable of the quick response times and high data-rates to make split-second driving decisions from afar.

Ericsson and Telefonica worked in partnership with KTH, Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, and vehicle safety testing company Idiada to organise the demonstration.

Javier Lorca, head of innovation in wireless access networks at Telefonica said using state-of-the-art wireless networks to remotely control vehicles at a distance has many possible applications, ranging from electric fleets traversing university campuses and even, eventually for wide scale public transport.

But he cautioned that, for the near term, such applications would require travelling only within closed-circuit, predictable routes and in situations where it is otherwise impractical for the driver to be seated behind the wheel of the vehicle itself.

The event was intended to highlight the possibilities of 5G, or fifth-generation, wireless networks, which are expected to begin to become mainstream around the world in the years after 2020.

However, Telefonica said in a statement that current, so-called 4.5G networks could handle most of these demands.

Telefonica has invested 38 billion euros in the last five years to reach millions of homes with it higher-speed fibre fixed-line broadband network, which it considers to be crucial to 5G.

This is a fascinating portrait of Facebook board member, Gawker bankrupter, and Drumpf adviser Peter Thiel's data mining/analytics company Palantir and how it has been helping the NSA and other alphabet agencies spy on U.S. citizens as well as the rest of the world. Like Robert Mercer, backer of Breitbart and Drumpf and — it turns out — the Brexit movement via Cambridge Analytics, Thiel is another billionaire conservative political influencer who leveraged his early investment in Facebook and other tech startups into yet another data analytics enterprise. And like so many others in the data mining/analytics space, he naturally opted to court one of the biggest buyers of such services, the NSA. The character of Zimmerman in my novel 4o4 - A John Decker Thriller, about the surveillance state, recently listed as a Top Ten Amazon Bestseller in Technothrillers, was based in part on Mercer and Thiel. Check out this great story from the The Intercept.

HOW PETER THIEL’S PALANTIR HELPED THE NSA SPY ON THE WHOLE WORLD

Sam Biddle

DONALD TRUMP HAS inherited the most powerful machine for spying ever devised. How this petty, vengeful man might wield and expand the sprawling American spy apparatus, already vulnerable to abuse, is disturbing enough on its own. But the outlook is even worse considering Trump’s vast preference for private sector expertise and new strategic friendship with Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whose controversial (and opaque) company Palantir has long sought to sell governments an unmatched power to sift and exploit information of any kind. Thiel represents a perfect nexus of government clout with the kind of corporate swagger Trump loves. The Intercept can now reveal that Palantir has worked for years to boost the global dragnet of the NSA and its international partners, and was in fact co-created with American spies. 

Peter Thiel became one of the American political mainstream’s most notorious figures in 2016 (when it emerged he was bankrolling a lawsuit against Gawker Media, my former employer) even before he won a direct line to the White House. Now he brings to his role as presidential adviser decades of experience as kingly investor and token nonliberal on Facebook’s board of directors, a Rolodex of software luminaries, and a decidedly Trumpian devotion to controversy and contrarianism. But perhaps the most appealing asset Thiel can offer our bewildered new president will be Palantir Technologies, which Thiel founded with Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale in 2004.

Palantir has never masked its ambitions, in particular the desire to sell its services to the U.S. government — the CIA itself was an early investor in the startup through In-Q-Tel, the agency’s venture capital branch. But Palantir refuses to discuss or even name its government clientele, despite landing “at least $1.2 billion” in federal contracts since 2009, according to an August 2016 report in Politico. The company was last valued at $20 billion and is expected to pursue an IPO in the near future. In a 2012 interview with TechCrunch, while boasting of ties to the intelligence community, Karp said nondisclosure contracts prevent him from speaking about Palantir’s government work.

Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, speaks during the WSJDLive Global Technology Conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., on Oct. 26, 2016.

“Palantir” is generally used interchangeably to refer to both Thiel and Karp’s company and the software that company creates. Its two main products are Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis, more geeky winks from a company whose Tolkien namesake is a type of magical sphere used by the evil lord Sauron to surveil, trick, and threaten his enemies across Middle Earth. While Palantir Metropolis is pegged to quantitative analysis for Wall Street banks and hedge funds, Gotham (formerly Palantir Government) is designed for the needs of intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security customers. Gotham works by importing large reams of “structured” data (like spreadsheets) and “unstructured” data (like images) into one centralized database, where all of the information can be visualized and analyzed in one workspace. For example, a 2010 demo showed how Palantir Government could be used to chart the flow of weapons throughout the Middle East by importing disparate data sources like equipment lot numbers, manufacturer data, and the locations of Hezbollah training camps. Palantir’s chief appeal is that it’s not designed to do any single thing in particular, but is flexible and powerful enough to accommodate the requirements of any organization that needs to process large amounts of both personal and abstract data.

A Palantir promotional video.

Despite all the grandstanding about lucrative, shadowy government contracts, co-founder Karp does not shy away from taking a stand in the debate over government surveillance. In a Forbes profile in 2013, he played privacy lamb, saying, “I didn’t sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair. … We have to find places that we protect away from government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people we’d like to be.” In that same article, Thiel lays out Palantir’s mission with privacy in mind: to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.” After the first wave of revelations spurred by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, Palantir was quick to deny that it had any connection to the NSA spy program known as PRISM, which shared an unfortunate code name with one of its own software products. The current iteration of Palantir’s website includes an entire section dedicated to “Privacy & Civil Liberties,” proclaiming the company’s support of both:

Palantir Technologies is a mission-driven company, and a core component of that mission is protecting our fundamental rights to privacy and civil liberties. …

Some argue that society must “balance” freedom and safety, and that in order to better protect ourselves from those who would do us harm, we have to give up some of our liberties. We believe that this is a false choice in many areas. Particularly in the world of data analysis, liberty does not have to be sacrificed to enhance security. Palantir is constantly looking for ways to protect privacy and individual liberty through its technology while enabling the powerful analysis necessary to generate the actionable intelligence that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to fulfill their missions.

It’s hard to square this purported commitment to privacy with proof, garnered from documents provided by Edward Snowden, that Palantir has helped expand and accelerate the NSA’s global spy network, which is jointly administered with allied foreign agencies around the world. Notably, the partnership has included building software specifically to facilitate, augment, and accelerate the use of XKEYSCORE, one of the most expansive and potentially intrusive tools in the NSA’s arsenal. According to Snowden documents published by The Guardian in 2013, XKEYSCORE is by the NSA’s own admission its “widest reaching” program, capturing “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” A subsequent report by The Intercept showed that XKEYSCORE’s “collected communications not only include emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions, and more.” For the NSA and its global partners, XKEYSCORE makes all of this as searchable as a hotel reservation site.

But how do you make so much data comprehensible for human spies? As the additional documents published with this article demonstrate, Palantir sold its services to make one of the most powerful surveillance systems ever devised even more powerful, bringing clarity and slick visuals to an ocean of surveillance data.

An office building occupied by the technology firm Palantir in McLean, Va., on Oct. 11, 2014.

PALANTIR’S RELATIONSHIP WITH government spy agencies appears to date back to at least 2008, when representatives from the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters, joined their American peers at VisWeek, an annual data visualization and computing conference organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. Attendees from throughout government and academia gather to network with members of the private sector at the event, where they compete in teams to solve hypothetical data-based puzzles as part of the Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge. As described in a document saved by GCHQ, Palantir fielded a team in 2008 and tackled one such scenario using its own software. It was a powerful marketing opportunity at a conference filled with potential buyers.

In the demo, Palantir engineers showed how their software could be used to identify Wikipedia users who belonged to a fictional radical religious sect and graph their social relationships. In Palantir’s pitch, its approach to the VAST Challenge involved using software to enable “many analysts working together [to] truly leverage their collective mind.” The fake scenario’s target, a cartoonishly sinister religious sect called “the Paraiso Movement,” was suspected of a terrorist bombing, but the unmentioned and obvious subtext of the experiment was the fact that such techniques could be applied to de-anonymize and track members of any political or ideological group. Among a litany of other conclusions, Palantir determined the group was prone to violence because its “Manifesto’s intellectual influences include ‘Pancho Villa, Che Guevara, Leon Trotsky, [and] Cuban revolutionary Jose Martí,’ a list of military commanders and revolutionaries with a history of violent actions.”

The delegation from GCHQ returned from VisWeek excited and impressed. In a classified report from those who attended, Palantir’s potential for aiding the spy agency was described in breathless terms. “Palantir are a relatively new Silicon Valley startup who are sponsored by the CIA,” the report began. “They claim to have significant involvement with the US intelligence community, although none yet at NSA.” GCHQ noted that Palantir “has been developed closely internally with intelligence community users (unspecified, but likely to be the CIA given the funding).” The report described Palantir’s demo as “so significant” that it warranted its own entry in GCHQ’s classified internal wiki, calling the software “extremely sophisticated and mature. … We were very impressed. You need to see it to believe it.”

The report conceded, however, that “it would take an enormous effort for an in-house developed GCHQ system to get to the same level of sophistication” as Palantir. The GCHQ briefers also expressed hesitation over the price tag, noting that “adoption would have [a] huge monetary … cost,” and over the implications of essentially outsourcing intelligence analysis software to the private sector, thus making the agency “utterly dependent on a commercial product.” Finally, the report added that “it is possible there may be concerns over security — the company have published a lot of information on their website about how their product is used in intelligence analysis, some of which we feel very uncomfortable about.”

A page from Palantir’s “Executive Summary” document, provided to government clients.

However anxious British intelligence was about Palantir’s self-promotion, the worry must not have lasted very long. Within two years, documents show that at least three members of the “Five Eyes” spy alliance between the United States, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were employing Palantir to help gather and process data from around the world. Palantir excels at making connections between enormous, separate databases, pulling big buckets of information (call records, IP addresses, financial transactions, names, conversations, travel records) into one centralized heap and visualizing them coherently, thus solving one of the persistent problems of modern intelligence gathering: data overload.

A GCHQ wiki page titled “Visualisation,” outlining different ways “to provide insight into some set of data,” puts succinctly Palantir’s intelligence value:

Palantir is an information management platform for analysis developed by Palantir Technologies. It integrates structured and unstructured data, provides search and discovery capabilities, knowledge management, and collaborative features. The goal is to offer the infrastructure, or ‘full stack,’ that intelligence organizations require for analysis.

Bullet-pointed features of note included a “Graph View,” “Timelining capabilities,” and “Geo View.”

A GCHQ diagram indicates how Palantir could be used as part of a computer network attack.

Under the Five Eyes arrangement, member countries collect and pool enormous streams of data and metadata collected through tools like XKEYSCORE, amounting to tens of billions of records. The alliance is constantly devising (or attempting) new, experimental methods of prying data out of closed and private sources, including by hacking into computers and networks in non-Five Eyes countries and infecting them with malware.

A 2011 PowerPoint presentation from GCHQ’s Network Defence Intelligence & Security Team (NDIST) — which, as The Intercept has previously reported, “worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks” — mentioned Palantir as a tool for processing data gathered in the course of its malware-oriented work. Palantir’s software was described as an “analyst workspace [for] pulling together disparate information and displaying it in novel ways,” and was used closely in conjunction with other intelligence software tools, like the NSA’s notorious XKEYSCORE search system. The novel ways of using Palantir for spying seemed open-ended, even imaginative: A 2010 presentation on the joint NSA-GCHQ “Mastering the Internet” surveillance program mentioned the prospect of running Palantir software on “Android handsets” as part of a SIGINT-based “augmented reality” experience. It’s unclear what exactly this means or could even look like.

Above all, these documents depict Palantir’s software as a sort of consolidating agent, allowing Five Eyes analysts to make sense of tremendous amounts of data that might have been otherwise unintelligible or highly time-consuming to digest. In a 2011 presentation to the NSA, classified top secret, an NDIST operative noted the “good collection” of personal data among the Five Eyes alliance but lamented the “poor analytics,” and described the attempt to find new tools for SIGINT analysis, in which it “conducted a review of 14 different systems that might work.” The review considered services from Lockheed Martin and Detica (a subsidiary of BAE Systems) but decided on the up-and-comer from Palo Alto.

Palantir is described as having been funded not only by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital branch, but furthermore created “through [an] iterative collaboration between Palantir computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the course of nearly three years.” While it’s long been known that Palantir got on its feet with the intelligence community’s money, it has not been previously reported that the intelligence community actually helped build the software. The continuous praise seen in these documents shows that the collaboration paid off. Under the new “Palantir Model,” “data can come from anywhere” and can be “asked whatever the analyst wants.”

 

Along with Palantir’s ability to pull in “direct XKS Results,” the presentation boasted that the software was already connected to 10 other secret Five Eyes and GCHQ programs and was highly popular among analysts. It even offered testimonials (TWO FACE appears to be a code name for the implementation of Palantir):

[Palantir] is the best tool I have ever worked with. It’s intuitive, i.e. idiot-proof, and can do a lot you never even dreamt of doing.

This morning, using TWO FACE rather than XKS to review the activity of the last 3 days. It reduced the initial analysis time by at least 50%.

Enthusiasm runs throughout the PowerPoint: A slide titled “Unexpected Benefits” reads like a marketing brochure, exclaiming that Palantir “interacts with anything!” including Google Earth, and “You can even use it on a iphone or laptop.” The next slide, on “Potential Downsides,” is really more praise in disguise: Palantir “Looks expensive” but “isn’t as expensive as expected.” The answer to “What can’t it do?” is revealing: “However we ask, Palantir answer,” indicating that the collaboration between spies and startup didn’t end with Palantir’s CIA-funded origins, but that the company was willing to create new features for the intelligence community by request. 

On GCHQ’s internal wiki page for TWO FACE, analysts were offered a “how to” guide for incorporating Palantir into their daily routine, covering introductory topics like “How do I … Get Data from XKS in Palantir,” “How do I … Run a bulk search,” and “How do I … Run bulk operations over my objects in Palantir.” For anyone in need of a hand, “training is currently offered as 1-2-1 desk based training with a Palantir trainer. This gives you the opportunity to quickly apply Palantir to your current work task.” Palantir often sends “forward deployed engineers,” or FDEs, to work alongside clients at their offices and provide assistance and engineering services, though the typical client does not have access to the world’s largest troves of personal information. For analysts interested in tinkering with Palantir, there was even a dedicated instant message chat room open to anyone for “informally” discussing the software.

The GCHQ wiki includes links to classified webpages describing Palantir’s use by the Australian Defence Signals Directorate (now called the Australian Signals Directorate) and to a Palantir entry on the NSA’s internal “Intellipedia,” though The Intercept does not have access to copies of the linked sites. However, embedded within Intellipedia HTML files available to The Intercept are references to a variety of NSA-Palantir programs, including “Palantir Classification Helper,” “[Target Knowledge Base] to Palantir PXML,” and “PalantirAuthService.” (Internal Palantir documents obtained by TechCrunch in 2013 provide additional confirmation of the NSA’s relationship with the company.)

One Palantir program used by GCHQ, a software plug-in named “Kite,” was preserved almost in its entirety among documents provided to The Intercept. An analysis of Kite’s source code shows just how much flexibility the company afforded Five Eyes spies. Developers and analysts could ingest data locally using either Palantir’s “Workspace” application or Kite. When they were satisfied the process was working properly, they could push it into a Palantir data repository where other Workspace users could also access it, almost akin to a Google Spreadsheets collaboration. When analysts were at their Palantir workstation, they could perform simple imports of static data, but when they wanted to perform more complicated tasks like import databases or set up recurring automatic imports, they turned to Kite.

Kite worked by importing intelligence data and converting it into an XML file that could be loaded into a Palantir data repository. Out of the box, Kite was able to handle a variety of types of data (including dates, images, geolocations, etc.), but GCHQ was free to extend it by writing custom fields for complicated types of data the agency might need to analyze. The import tools were designed to handle a variety of use cases, including static data sets, databases that were updated frequently, and data stores controlled by third parties to which GCHQ was able to gain access.

This collaborative environment also produced a piece of software called “XKEYSCORE Helper,” a tool programmed with Palantir (and thoroughly stamped with its logo) that allowed analysts to essentially import data from the NSA’s pipeline, investigate and visualize it through Palantir, and then presumably pass it to fellow analysts or Five Eyes intelligence partners. One of XKEYSCORE’s only apparent failings is that it’s so incredibly powerful, so effective at vacuuming personal metadata from the entire internet, that the volume of information it extracts can be overwhelming. Imagine trying to search your Gmail account, only the results are pulled from every Gmail inbox in the world. 

MAKING XKEYSCORE MORE intelligible — and thus much more effective — appears to have been one of Palantir’s chief successes. The helper tool, documented in a GCHQ PDF guide, provided a means of transferring data captured by the NSA’s XKEYSCORE directly into Palantir, where presumably it would be far easier to analyze for, say, specific people and places. An analyst using XKEYSCORE could pull every IP address in Moscow and Tehran that visited a given website or made a Skype call at 14:15 Eastern Time, for example, and then import the resulting data set into Palantir in order to identify additional connections between the addresses or plot their positions using Google Earth. 

Palantir was also used as part of a GCHQ project code-named LOVELY HORSE, which sought to improve the agency’s ability to collect so-called open source intelligence — data available on the public internet, like tweets, blog posts, and news articles. Given the “unstructured” nature of this kind of data, Palantir was cited as “an enrichment to existing [LOVELY HORSE] investigations … the content should then be viewable in a human readable format within Palantir.”

Palantir’s impressive data-mining abilities are well-documented, but so too is the potential for misuse. Palantir software is designed to make it easy to sift through piles of information that would be completely inscrutable to a human alone, but the human driving the computer is still responsible for making judgments, good or bad.

A 2011 document by GCHQ’s SIGINT Development Steering Group, a staff committee dedicated to implementing new spy methods, listed some of these worries. In a table listing “risks & challenges,” the SDSG expressed a “concern that [Palantir] gives the analyst greater potential for going down too many analytical paths which could distract from the intelligence requirement.” What it could mean for analysts to distract themselves by going down extraneous “paths” while browsing the world’s most advanced spy machine is left unsaid. But Palantir’s data-mining abilities were such that the SDSG wondered if its spies should be blocked from having full access right off the bat and suggested configuring Palantir software so that parts would “unlock … based on analysts skill level, hiding buttons and features until needed and capable of utilising.” If Palantir succeeded in fixing the intelligence problem of being overwhelmed with data, it may have created a problem of over-analysis — the company’s software offers such a multitude of ways to visualize and explore massive data sets that analysts could get lost in the funhouse of infographics, rather than simply being overwhelmed by the scale of their task.

If Palantir’s potential for misuse occurred to the company’s spy clients, surely it must have occurred to Palantir itself, especially given the company’s aforementioned “commitment” to privacy and civil liberties. Sure enough, in 2012 the company announced the formation of the Palantir Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties, a committee of academics and consultants with expertise in those fields. Palantir claimed that convening the PCAP had “provided us with invaluable guidance as we try to responsibly navigate the often ill-defined legal, political, technological, and ethical frameworks that sometimes govern the various activities of our customers,” and continued to discuss the privacy and civil liberties “implications of product developments and to suggest potential ways to mitigate any negative effects.” Still, Palantir made clear that the “PCAP is advisory only — any decisions that we make after consulting with the PCAP are entirely our own.”

What would a privacy-minded conversation about privacy-breaching software look like? How had a privacy and civil liberties council navigated the fact that Palantir’s clientele had directly engaged in one of the greatest privacy and civil liberties breaches of all time? It’s hard to find an answer.

Palantir wrote that it structured the nondisclosure agreement signed by PCAP members so that they “will be free to discuss anything that they learn in working with us unless we clearly designate information as proprietary or otherwise confidential (something that we have rarely found necessary except on very limited occasions).” But despite this assurance of transparency, all but one of the PCAP’s former and current members either did not return a request for comment for this article or declined to comment citing the NDA.

The former PCAP member who did respond, Stanford privacy scholar Omer Tene, told The Intercept that he was unaware of “any specific relationship, agreement, or project that you’re referring to,” and said he was not permitted to answer whether Palantir’s work with the intelligence community was ever a source of tension with the PCAP. He declined to comment on either the NSA or GCHQ specifically. “In general,” Tene said, “the role of the PCAP was to hear about client engagement or new products and offerings that the company was about to launch, and to opine as to the way they should be set up or delivered in order to minimize privacy and civil liberties concerns.” But without any further detail, it’s unclear whether the PCAP was ever briefed on the company’s work for spy agencies, or whether such work was a matter of debate.

There’s little detail to be found on archived versions of Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties-focused blog, which appears to have been deleted sometime after the PCAP was formed. Palantir spokesperson Matt Long told The Intercept to contact the Palantir media team for questions regarding the vanished blog at the same email address used to reach Long in the first place. Palantir did not respond to additional repeated requests for comment and clarification.

A GCHQ spokesperson provided a boilerplate statement reiterating the agency’s “longstanding policy” against commenting on intelligence matters and asserted that all its activities are “carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework.” The NSA did not provide a response.

Anyone worried that the most powerful spy agencies on Earth might use Palantir software to violate the privacy or civil rights of the vast number of people under constant surveillance may derive some cold comfort in a portion of the user agreement language Palantir provided for the Kite plug-in, which stipulates that the user will not violate “any applicable law” or the privacy or the rights “of any third party.” The world will just have to hope Palantir’s most powerful customers follow the rules.

The hypocrisy of the Drumpf Administration is breathtaking. Now that it's one of their own, they're all hot and heavy about government surveillance. In point of fact, Michael Flynn didn't do anything that any other front man for an incoming President has done, including that bastion of reactionary radicalism Jimmy Carter! Please. The Democratic outrage is as disingenuous as Republican horror. "I am shocked, shocked that there is gambling going on here." All I can say is, "Your winnings, sir." These issues are exactly the ones I cover in my novel, 4o4 - A John Decker Thriller, about the surveillance state, recently listed as a Top Ten Amazon Bestseller in Technothrillers. For more on this story, visit The Intercept. 

Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence speaks to reporters after attending the GOP weekly meeting at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 14, 2017, in Washington.

After Michael Flynn’s Resignation, Surveillance Defenders Suddenly Care About Wiretap Abuse

by Alex Emmons

REP. DEVIN NUNES, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a leading defender of government surveillance programs, reacted with outrage when he found out the FBI had listened in on conversations between the Russian ambassador and a top Trump official.

“I expect for the FBI to tell me what is going on, and they better have a good answer,” the California Republican told the Washington Post. “The big problem I see here is that you have an American citizen who had his phone calls recorded.”

Telephone conversations between Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak led to Flynn’s resignation.

The fact that communications from the Russian delegation in Washington are closely monitored should surprise no one. The FBI routinely uses the NSA’s eavesdropping techniques to monitor the delegation — for obvious intelligence and counterintelligence reasons — and as a former top intelligence official in the Obama administration, Flynn must have known that his conversation would be intercepted.

Yet after the news of Flynn’s resignation, several traditional surveillance defenders rushed to the defense of his privacy rights as an “American citizen.”

The surveillance-touting Wall Street Journal in an editorial Monday dropped its usual use of the term “intelligence professionals” to question whether “U.S. spooks” had a court order to listen to Flynn’s conversations.

What’s particularly ironic about Nunes’s comments was that he seemed to be ignoring one of the biggest gaps in U.S. surveillance law — one which he has personally defended — that allows the government to spy on millions of Americans without any sort of probable cause by targeting their communications with people overseas.

“The concept that many Americans’ communications are incidentally recorded when speaking to foreign targets is Foreign Intelligence 101,” said Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Constitution Project. “It’s hard to believe a competent intelligence committee chair doesn’t understand this.”

The Wall Street Journal has also celebrated the law that contains the loophole and after its reauthorization in 2013 praised Obama as an “unapologetic asserter of Presidential powers.”

In 2015, Reps. Zoe Loefgren, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., introduced an amendment that would have required the FBI to get a search warrant in the exact situation Flynn is facing: when they rely on capabilities of the NSA to target international communications that involve Americans.

But rather than expressing concern then, Nunes sent a letter to his colleagues opposing the measure. “When the Intelligence Community acquires the communications of CT [counterterrorism] or CI [counterintelligence] targets abroad, among the most critical issues is to determine if they are communicating with persons in the United States,” he wrote.

In an email to The Intercept, a spokesman for Nunes tried to walk back the congressman’s earlier statement, saying his concerns were about whether Flynn’s identity could have legally been “unmasked” due to minimization procedures built into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The minimization procedures call for the redaction of names of “U.S. persons” when they are caught up in international surveillance. But they allow the identity of U.S. persons to be unmasked whenever it is necessary to understand the communication — which is almost certainly the case with Flynn’s call.

“This seems to be an excuse that either doesn’t comprehend or want to acknowledge how broadly the FBI can fully access any Americans’ incidentally recorded communications under FISA,” Laperruque said.

This is hardly the first time that foreign intelligence wiretaps have gotten U.S. persons in trouble. The FBI has relied on NSA-collected information in a number of criminal cases — and has even repeatedly failed to provide legal notice to defendants that the evidence used in their case was acquired that way.

It’s also not the first time that NSA hawks have — if briefly — leapt to the defense of privacy rights when the privacy being violated involved them or their political allies.

Last year, for example, Sen. Marco Rubio — who has argued for expanding and permanently extending many of the NSA’s surveillance programs — responded with shock and outrage upon learning in 2015 that the NSA was spying on the Israeli government and swept up some of his own communications in the process.

The problem for these newfound surveillance critics is that if they want to demand protections for Americans caught up in the NSA’s web, they have to do so for all Americans — not just their political allies.