Siemens Develops Multi-Purpose Surveillance System 65
ekesis tips a story up at NewScientist about the development of a new surveillance system by German engineering conglomerate Siemens. The system is notable for its integration of many different types of automated data-gathering. It can scan "telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records." It uses advanced pattern-recognition software to pick out unusual activities and important pieces of data. So far, the system has been sold to 60 countries.
"According to a document obtained by New Scientist, the system integrates tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines... This software is trained on a large number of sample documents to pick out items such as names, phone numbers and places from generic text. This means it can spot names or numbers that crop up alongside anyone already of interest to the authorities, and then catalogue any documents that contain such associates."
invasion of privacy? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:invasion of privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
You do realize that, for email traffic, this is exactly what the 'Carnivore' program was in the USA?
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Did he forget his sarcasm tags?
The Party Invented Total Information Awareness. (Score:1, Insightful)
Countries don't matter right now. People still remember that the telephone existed before Total Information Awareness [wikipedia.org], so the party has yet to claim responsiblity for that. As #2 famously said, "there are no nations anymore, just corporations." Total information awareness eliminates the "stove pipes" and ties it all together. It is not surprising that a company claims to have produced TIA in a single box. The purpose is to track and suppress political dissent, so any old duopoly produced hack should wo
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but they're rarely on the ballot.
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Seimens shouldn't be doing anything in security.. (Score:1)
Hammering my fingersss nowww (Score:5, Funny)
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Your comment actually invoked my curiosity.
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] regarding Siemens:
Preceding World War II Siemens was involved in the secret rearmament of Germany. During the Second World War, Siemens supported the Hitler regime, contributed to the war effort and participated in the "Nazification" of the economy. Siemens had many factories in and around notorious extermination camps such as Auschwitz and used slave labor from concentration camps to build electric switches for military uses. In one example, almost
apparently (Score:1)
R.I.P.L.E.Y. Failed miserably at data pooling based on these things!!!
the bottom line (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the bottom line (Score:4, Insightful)
Yupe who cares if it is effective. It makes us believe that we are effective...
What gets me about this terrorism thing is that the only real combative way to deal with it is to change the public perception.
Look at Northern Ireland, intelligence, cops, and armies to the hilt! Did it stop anything? Nope! What stopped Northern Ireland and the violence? Peace agreements, discussions compromises!
Oh, but I suppose corporations can't sell "peace agreements..."
No! Never compromise! (Score:2)
Never! Never! To the death!! England should have bombed Ireland back to the Stone Age. ... It's obvious I'm kidding, right?
It can scan "telephone calls, email..." (Score:2)
Feeding its masters credit card numbers, bank accounts, SEXUAL FANTASIES, and little white lies!
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how does a 404 error pertain at all to this conversation?
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Considering it's a Slashdot conversation, the 404 error might be generically apropos.
However, my link obviously didn't make it through the system intact. FWIW, let's try again [slashdot.org].
Open Source version? (Score:5, Insightful)
:-)
Seriously, funding for work in statistical NLP has often come from governments and intel agencies (an example is, I think, is Clear Forest before it was purchased).
Entity extraction and correlation between documents is difficult to do well so it is not surprising that funding comes from governments and large corporations (yeah, not much difference between the two anymore).
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Kleinfeld is no longer CEO of Siemens, he now heads up Alcoa. New Siemens CEO is Peter Löscher.
I think.. (Score:5, Funny)
It's like fascism-in-a-can.
Now if they can only develop a way of this system generating a data cd, and automatically losing that on a train seat, it will meet all UK requirements.
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UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown-shirt just came in his pants on hearing this development.
I know there's a "Siemens" joke in there somewhere....
There's stiff compeition from the private sector (Score:2)
[SundayHerald.com] [sundayherald.com]
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Prank call: "Got fascism in the can? Well its got VD you better let it out!"
But seriously, anybody else think the US NSA just let this out (though Siemens) for others to use so they can "legally" collect data on US citizens through a built in back door?
Nah...
It's the New (Score:3, Funny)
Julia Child [moaa.org] Surveil-a-matic. Many tools in one convenient package. Comes with self-defense kitchen knives, navigational scarves, dog doo radio transmitters...First three thousand customers will also receive a month's supply of shark repellent [npr.org]. No more worries about those nasty lasers.
Oh goody (Score:1)
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they
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Another convenient package to be hacked.
Their ten geeks against our 300,000,000 geeks. Who do you think will win?
how many geeks does it take to muster a first-world class military?
Re:Oh goody (Score:4, Funny)
how many geeks does it take to muster a first-world class military?
That's a divide by zero problem, so it's a trick question.
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irregular behaviour, if it goes on long enough, becomes classified as regular behaviour... and is then undetected.
That assumes the system is set to continue learning when in the field. It is common practice in this area to train a system in the lab until it behaves in a desired way, and then remove the portion of the neural net or other NLP that learns, leaving just the classification part.
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Rather than solving the problem, removing the AI takes a step back in product evolution. The infamous They will have to do one of three things: Outlaw any unusual behavior, Investigate every abnormal behavior, or Ignore some abnormal behavior. The first two of these are different because in a police
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My Plea (Score:4, Insightful)
Every single government on Earth is convinced that, in one way or another, it can stop crime.
Need I remind this government that there has never been a completely crime-free country in the history of the world?
That's not to say you can't reduce the level of crime, but only at the expense of individual freedoms. This also depends on what you consider a crime -- locking people up for murder might work, but throwing someone in jail because they stared at a CC camera for too long...not so much.
I understand where the government is coming from here. This would be an invaluable tool in busting those who are suspected drug lords, crime lords, time lords, whatever. But the key here, and consistently, is "suspected".
Siemens sure isn't going to take a moral high ground here -- they're a business, and businesses should not be expected to have to make moral choices. They aren't people, despite how they're treated tax-wise in the US. They should be able to do what they can within the limits of the law, but be kept in check by the law. This isn't cynicism, this is realism. Simply assuming a company is going to do good is far more dangerous than making sure it does good.
Therefore, it's up to individual governments and those representing the people to take the high ground here. This sort of technology is going to rapidly advance to the point where every person on the planet can be observed from a couple of jerk's computers in an enclosed office, and the free ride of being completely "lost" is slowly vanishing. It comes down, then, to the power of the state and the beliefs of those representatives of the people to curtail and selectively use this technology for the embetterment of all people.
What that ultimately means is still completely up for grabs.
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They aren't people, despite how they're treated tax-wise in the US
they aren't treated like people tax-wise, they're treated like foreigners.. e.g. they never have to pay them.
they are, of course, treated like people when (and ONLY when) it benefits them, such as in court cases. Even then, the people they're treated like were supposedly deposed in most of the western world by the early 20th century.
I believe you've read the proper theory: the divine right of coporations?
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Need I remind this government that there has never been a completely crime-free country in the history of the world?
Well, the ones who didn't have any laws didn't have any crime.
Crime is defined not as something good or bad, but defined by the state.
This could be as innocuous as speeding to something very authoritarian where being a particular race or belonging to a particular political party is a crime.
The key is that if you want less crime, you shouldn't forget about moving the goal posts to where certain
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Siemens sure isn't going to take a moral high ground here -- they're a business, and businesses should not be expected to have to make moral choices.
Sorry, but that's self-serving sociopathic nonsense. Companies are just groups of people working together. Each of the people in that company, whether employee, director or shareholder, make moral and ethical choices, including those that affect the moral and ethical direction of the company. They are damn well totally responsible.
Or to put it another way: WT
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"WTF should forming a company give anybody a moral or ethical get-out-of-jail free card?"
I'm not saying it does. I'm saying the enforcement of those morals and ethics needs to rely more on the government than the company, because historically speaking, there are very few examples of companies willing to forestall profits for the sake of ethics and morality.
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I'm not saying it does. I'm saying the enforcement of those morals and ethics needs to rely more on the government than the company, because historically speaking, there are very few examples of companies willing to forestall profits for the sake of ethics and morality.
Well, it's mixed. It is true that large public companies tend to do this because everybody in the company can point at somebody else and say "they did it!" however it depends heavily on the ethics of the directors and founders. Scientists t
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>>Siemens sure isn't going to take a moral high ground here -- they're a business, and businesses should not be expected to have to make moral choices
And for this reason, businesses should not be given anything like good will or trust or a voice in government, which is by definition the working out between people what is best for people.
Throw business out of government forever. (Most) problems solved.
Appropriate mst3k quote! "You are EVIL" (Score:4, Insightful)
To quote Gypsy in response to "johnny long torso":
"You are evil! EEEVILLL! AAAAAHHH!".
Seriously, there's nothing "multi-purpose" about it.
It is a system designed solely for blanket stasi/gstapo style surveillance of wide swaths of people. Try to change your routine for any purpose (99.99% are legitimate), and you'll end up with the secret police beating you around.
Shame on anyone for producing this software, because there is no mistaking its intent.
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Well - "Shame on anyone.." Maybe but I once developed a statistical system to monitor the terminal users - actually to optimize inputs and outputs, running out of bandwidth! After a while the management realized that it could be used to grade the users (spying has always been easy if you control the system!) No way - took a lot of explanations and fighting to prevent that - you just can't statistically grade users by speed, errors, mistakes, retries, etc - too many other variables which are not known! I got
Employees (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering the number of scandals in which Siemens has been involved in the last few years, I guess
it would be a good idea to use this to spy on it's own employees
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/75295b46-dcc9-11db-a21d-000b5df10621.html [ft.com]
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/13/business/siemens.php [iht.com]
http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=97185 [thisdayonline.com]
Germany is listening (Score:4, Interesting)
So good luck with putting one of these new machines into your super secret intelligence facility.
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Very much without exception, these systems don't get to spy on everyone, just on the sheep. And terrorists. But mostly on sheep.
*meeeeeeeehhhh*
Welcome to the 4th Reich (Score:1)
Heil Hitler's Ghost!
Police state (Score:2)
The key ... (Score:3, Interesting)
...is that it can only scan that which it has access to. Its up to us th keep private records like "telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records" out of the government's hands until they present the proper warrants.
The risk to privacy will be that, once governments are in possession of such statistical tools, they will make a (valid) claim that they are all but useless without a baseline of 'normal' behavior for comparison.
You know what this means, Slashdotters? Its time for us to get abnormal and screw up their baseline.
My , how ironic a German company has this... (Score:3, Insightful)
In the early nineties thru the mid nought-ies I worked for Siemens at their North America electronics manufacturing facility. Through a stunning piece of managerial naïvety, we inherited a particularly inappropriate defect data collection hardware/software package already in use in Germany at at least one plant (over the course of several absolutely brutal years we ended up rewriting first the back-end, then the middle-tier and, just before the plant was sold to some modern-day Saxons for prompt pillaging and burning, the front-end...but I digress.) This software had originally been written with the express inability to trace a defect (or a more disturbing pattern of defects) back to a particular individual but could only indicate the line or workgroup that included the individual responsible (we were always told that "German law precluded tracing mistakes to a particular individual", that they preferred to "train/retrain as a group when they saw the need arise, and allow peer-pressure to solve the problem of getting 'the message' to the errant individual." Most ironic that, given such a "legal environment", a German company would come up with a system with such abilities. (of course, we are talking about Siemens here; anyone who has any experience with the company knows that the most honest part of their brochures/ads is that it's for a Siemens product -- and then sometimes even that must be taken with a grain of salt.)
btw, has anyone else noticed that "SIEMENS" is an anagram for "NEMESIS"?
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btw, has anyone else noticed that "SIEMENS" is an anagram for "NEMESIS"?
No, but I did notice that it is kind of a homophone for sea men.
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Suggested Reading (Score:1)