Crapaganda.com

Life insurers are testing an intensely personal new use for the vast dossiers of data being amassed about Americans: predicting people’s longevity.

In one of the biggest tests, the U.S. arm of British insurer Aviva PLC looked at 60,000 recent insurance applicants. It found that a new, “predictive modeling” system, based partly on consumer-marketing data, was “persuasive” in its ability to mimic traditional techniques.

The research heralds a remarkable expansion of the use of consumer-marketing data, which is traditionally used for advertising purposes.

This data increasingly is gathered online, often with consumers only vaguely aware that separate bits of information about them are being collected and collated in ways that can be surprisingly revealing. The growing trade in personal information is the subject of a Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy.

A key part of the Aviva test, run by Deloitte Consulting LLP, was estimating a person’s risk for illnesses such as high blood pressure and depression. Deloitte’s models assume that many diseases relate to lifestyle factors such as exercise habits and fast-food diets.

This kind of analysis, proponents argue, could lower insurance costs and eliminate an off-putting aspect of the insurance sale for some people.

“Requiring every customer to provide additional, and often unnecessary, information” such as blood or urine samples, “simply makes the process less efficient and less customer-friendly,” says John Currier, chief actuary for Aviva USA.

Read more »

Google has agreed to delete all personal data collected by its Street View cars from unsecured wireless networks. Google sparked an international outrage last month after it admitted to collecting information from unsecured Wi-Fi networks as its vehicles roamed residential streets. The company was accused of unlawfully harvesting data, including e-mails, passwords and website addresses, during the creation of its Street View maps.

British Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said Google will also introduce improved training measures on security awareness and data protection issues for all its employees worldwide, reports the Daily Mail.

Graham said: “I am very pleased to have a firm commitment from Google to work with my office to improve its handling of personal information.

“It is a significant achievement to have an undertaking from a major multinational corporation like Google Inc that extends to its global policies and not just its UK activities.”

Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president, signed an undertaking on behalf of Google Inc to put in place improved training measures on security awareness and data protection issues for all employees, the Information Commissioner’s Office said.

The company will also require its engineers to maintain a privacy design document for every new project before it is launched and the personal data collected in Britain will be deleted.

The decision is a victory for privacy campaigners, who were furious that Google had refused to back down over claims that it had unlawfully accessed private data, albeit accidentally.

Source: HindustanTimes

If Assange is guilty of any sexually based crimes he should be punished to the full extent of the law. I, however, am not convinced that this isn’t a dirty trick. Wikileaks has pissed off the USA. This is the kind of thing that you do when you can’t get away with actually killing someone — you assassinate their character.

A Swedish prosecutor said on Thursday that she would seek a court order for the arrest of Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blower’s Web site, for questioning on charges of rape and other offenses.

Mr. Assange’s lawyer in Britain, Mark Stephens, said the allegations were “false and without basis.”

In recent weeks, Mr. Assange has made several public appearances in London, after ending a stay of several weeks in Sweden and flying first to Berlin, then to London, in early October. It was not immediately clear whether the 39-year-old Australian remains in Britain.

A statement issued by Marianne Ny, the director of the Stockholm prosecutor’s office, said an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange would be sought at a court hearing to be held in the Swedish capital at 2 p.m. local time on Thursday.

She said that “more information concerning the hearing and its consequences” would be made available after the court session.

“I request the District Court of Stockholm to detain Mr. Assange in his absence, suspected of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion,” Ms. Ny’s statement said, in an English version provided by her office.

“The reason for my request is that we have been unable to interrogate him. So far, we have not been able to meet with him to accomplish the interrogations.”

Mr. Stephens said in a statement that “over the last three months, despite numerous demands, neither Mr. Assange, nor his legal counsel has received a single word in writing from the Swedish authorities relating to the allegations.” It added that the prosecutor’s “behavior is not a prosecution, but a persecution.”

“Our client has always maintained his innocence,” the statement said. “The allegations against him are false and without basis. As a result of these false allegations and bizarre legal interpretations our client now has his name and reputation besmirched.”

“My client is now in the extraordinary position that, despite his innocence, and despite never having been charged, and despite never receiving a single piece of paper about the allegations against him, one in ten Internet references to the word “rape” also include his name. Every day that this flawed investigation continues the damages to his reputation are compounded,” the statement said.

Mr. Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 as a forum for publishing secret and confidential documents of political, military and economic significance passed to the organization by whistle-blowers who have obtained them from governments, corporations and other sources.

This summer, WikiLeaks posted on its Web site a cache of 77,000 secret Pentagon documents on the war in Afghanistan, and it followed that last month by posting nearly 400,000 Pentagon documents, also secret, on the Iraq war.

On both occasions, the documents were provided in advance to The New York Times, the Guardian of Britain and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany, all of which ran extensive articles focusing on the insights the documents gave onto the United States’ conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Obama administration condemned both leaks, and demanded that WikiLeaks “return” all secret American documents and undertake not to publish any more in future.

The Pentagon and the Justice Department have established a task force to probe all aspects of the affair, and officials have said that prosecution of Mr. Assange and his associates under the 1917 Espionage Act is one step under consideration.

The allegations of rape and sexual molestation against the WikiLeaks founder arose shortly after he arrived in Sweden in late August on a journey that he described at the time as aimed at establishing a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks under Sweden’s broad press freedom laws.

The two Swedish women, volunteers who had offered to assist WikiLeaks, met the Australian in his first days in Sweden. In a confused legal sequence, the Stockholm prosecutor’s office first issued a warrant for Mr. Assange’s arrest, then withdrew it, and later announced that it was continuing to investigate the rape and sexual molestation charges.

The Stockholm prosecutor’s office first issued a warrant for Mr. Assange’s arrest, then withdrew it, and later announced that it was continuing to investigate the rape and sexual molestation charges.

Mr. Assange responded at the time by saying that he was a victim of “dirty tricks” and that his relations with the two women were consensual. Subsequently, in London, he spoke of a “smear campaign” against him and WikiLeaks, and complained about the Swedish prosecutor’s delay in disposing of the case. During an interview in London with The New York Times on October 17, he said 50 days had passed since the Swedish allegations were first made public.

The prosecutor’s action on Thursday came more than 12 weeks after the prosecutor’s office made its first statement in the affair, saying it wanted to interview Mr. Assange.

The Thursday statement implied that no interview had ever taken place. Mr. Assange has spoken on a number of occasions in recent weeks of his growing anxiety about his personal security.

He suggested at a news conference in London on October 23 that he might have to move to Moscow or Havana, Cuba, in his search for a secure base.

In recent days, WikiLeaks supporters have made moves to establish a legal base for WikiLeaks in Iceland, where Mr. Assange spent several weeks earlier this year.

Daniel Ellsberg, the 79-year-old American military analyst who provided The New York Times and other publications with copies of the secret Pentagon documents on the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers in 1971, flew to London from California to support Mr. Assange at the mid-October news conference which he held in conjunction with the publication of the secret Iraq war documents on the WikiLeaks Web site.

“Choose Havana,” Mr. Ellsberg said, after the Australian spoke of his possible destinations, prompting laughter from Mr. Assange and many of his supporters.

In his statement, Mr. Stephens, the lawyer, said his Mr. Assange had “repeatedly offered to be interviewed, first in Sweden, and then in Britain (including at the Swedish Embassy), either in person or by telephone, videoconferencing or email and he has also offered to make a sworn statement on affidavit.”

“Before leaving Sweden Mr. Assange asked to be interviewed by the prosecution on several occasions in relation to the allegations, staying over a month in Stockholm, at considerable expense and despite many engagements elsewhere, in order to clear his name. Eventually the prosecution told his Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig that he was free to leave the country, without interview, which he did,” the statement said.

Mr. Stephens, Mr. Assange’s lawyer, has worked for The Times in the past on libel cases, the most recent of which ended earlier this year.

Source: NY Times

Wikileaks shrugs off threats by US Government.

The online whistle-blower WikiLeaks said it will continue to publish more secret files from governments around the world despite U.S. demands to cancel plans to release classified military documents.

Sounds like the people behind Wikileaks are under some pressure. Since this is unlikely to turn up in your newspapers, I post it here to spread awareness.

Wikileaks has a mission of bringing hidden information to light, when it’s in the public interest. Wikipedia outlines their greatest hits, including Gauntanamo Bay procedure documents, scientology secrets, and net censorship lists. They come under fire sometimes for hosting material that probably isn’t much in the public interest, but overall they have contributed some compelling information to some fractious global arguments.

In the last 24 hours, their Twitter feed has contained some worrying content.

• WikiLeaks to reveal Pentagon murder-coverup at US National Press Club, Apr 5, 9am; contact press-club@sunshinepress.org
• WikiLeaks is currently under an aggressive US and Icelandic surveillance operation. Following/photographing/filming/detaining
• If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film. And you know who is responsible.
• Two under State Dep diplomatic cover followed our editor from Iceland to http://skup.no on Thursday.
• One related person was detained for 22 hours. Computer’s seized.That’s http://www.skup.no
• We know our possession of the decrypted airstrike video is now being discussed at the highest levels of US command.
• We have been shown secret photos of our production meetings and been asked specific questions during detention related to the airstrike.
• We have airline records of the State Dep/CIA tails. Don’t think you can get away with it. You cannot. This is WikiLeaks.

All those came out in a rush, then silence for hours. Might just be a timezone thing, with people sleeping, or maybe there’s been no news, or maybe everyone with access to the Twitter feed has been detained. I await more information.

UPDATE: “To those worrying about us–we’re fine, and will issue a suitable riposte shortly.” 8.22am NZ time.

UPDATE: Just noticed that the first tweet quoted, “WikiLeaks to reveal Pentagon murder-coverup” is gone from the feed. Now I wish I’d linked to all of them individually. Anyway, it was definitely there, and I think Linda is right that it is this previously-referred-to video

UPDATE: commenter eru found the missing tweet. It isn’t visible in the ordinary feed for some reason.

WikiLeaks Release 1.0 (1st of 7 parts)

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?

Probably not.

Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.

Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.

“Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,” said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division. “You can find out who an individual is without it.”

In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male.

So far, this type of powerful data mining, which relies on sophisticated statistical correlations, is mostly in the realm of university researchers, not identity thieves and marketers.

But the F.T.C. is worried that rules to protect privacy have not kept up with technology. The agency is convening on Wednesday the third of three workshops on the issue.

Its concerns are hardly far-fetched. Last fall, Netflix awarded $1 million to a team of statisticians and computer scientists who won a three-year contest to analyze the movie rental history of 500,000 subscribers and improve the predictive accuracy of Netflix’s recommendation software by at least 10 percent.

On Friday, Netflix said that it was shelving plans for a second contest — bowing to privacy concerns raised by the F.T.C. and a private litigant. In 2008, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the customer data released for that first contest, despite being stripped of names and other direct identifying information, could often be “de-anonymized” by statistically analyzing an individual’s distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations.

In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual’s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.

You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say.

The power of computers to identify people from social patterns alone was demonstrated last year in a study by the same pair of researchers that cracked Netflix’s anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Narayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University.

By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.

“When you link these large data sets together, a small slice of our behavior and the structure of our social networks can be identifying,” Mr. Shmatikov said.

Even more unnerving to privacy advocates is the work of two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. In a paper published last year, Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross reported that they could accurately predict the full, nine-digit Social Security numbers for 8.5 percent of the people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003 — nearly five million individuals.

Social Security numbers are prized by identity thieves because they are used both as identifiers and to authenticate banking, credit card and other transactions.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers used publicly available information from many sources, including profiles on social networks, to narrow their search for two pieces of data crucial to identifying people — birthdates and city or state of birth.

That helped them figure out the first three digits of each Social Security number, which the government had assigned by location. The remaining six digits had been assigned through methods the government didn’t disclose, although they were related to when the person applied for the number. The researchers used projections about those applications as well as other public data, like the Social Security numbers of dead people, and then ran repeated cycles of statistical correlation and inference to partly re-engineer the government’s number-assignment system.

To be sure, the work by Mr. Acquisti and Mr. Gross suggests a potential, not actual, risk. But unpublished research by them explores how criminals could use similar techniques for large-scale identity-theft schemes.

More generally, privacy advocates worry that the new frontiers of data collection, brokering and mining, are largely unregulated. They fear “online redlining,” where products and services are offered to some consumers and not others based on statistical inferences and predictions about individuals and their behavior.

The F.T.C. and Congress are weighing steps like tighter industry requirements and the creation of a “do not track” list, similar to the federal “do not call” list, to stop online monitoring.

But Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies social networks, is skeptical that rules will have much impact. His advice: “When you’re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you’re doing it in public — because increasingly, it is.”

Source: How Privacy Vanishes Online (NY Times)

Wikileaks is the website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive government, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors. Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. It is said that in the three years since Wikileaks start-up, they have had more scoops than the Washington Post has in the last 30 years.

In December of 2009, due to financial constraints, Wikileaks temporarily suspended all operations other than submission of material. That’s right, they went on strike. Materials that were previously published were no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirror sites. Wikileaks originally stated on its website that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were covered, and on February 3rd Wikileaks announced that their minimum fundraising goal had been achieved.  Their annual budget is $600,000. They lifted the service suspension after raising $430,000 in the month of January, 2010.

Wikileaks on the Culture Show – Friday 29th January 2010