Real Conspiracy Theories

I was browsing videos on Google Video and came across this one. I hope it provides a good laugh.

Google has developed a prototype of a system that can use your computer’s microphone to eavesdrop on you. The eavesdropping system would listen for sounds that it could then process in order to target advertising to you based on what TV program you are watching. Of course, an eavesdropping system could be expanded for other uses also. TechnologyReview.com has an article on the Google eavesdropping software:

“Their prototype software, detailed in a conference presentation in Europe last June, uses a computer’s built-in microphone to listen to the sounds in a room. It then filters each five-second snippet of sound to pick out audio from a TV, reduces the snippet to a digital “fingerprint,” searches an Internet server for a matching fingerprint from a pre-recorded show, and, if it finds a match, displays ads, chat rooms, or other information related to that snippet on the user’s computer.”

Google claims that they are not gathering enough information to really spy on people:

“When word of the research first appeared in the media, some bloggers and other technology watchers reacted with horror; many assumed that the background conversation picked up by the microphone in Google’s system would be uploaded to Google. But the technology makes it impractical; at four bytes, the fingerprints don’t contain enough information to reconstruct the original sounds in a room. “Some people did get the impression that we had an open microphone that was going to listen in on them,” says Norvig.”

But — consider how fast technology is progressing. I remember when 1Mb 3.5 inch floppy disks were high tech. With the gear I have in my laptop bag at this moment I now have the equivelent storage space of 180,512 3.5 inch floppy disks. Bandwidth and memory are going to be even cheaper in the near future. A computer eavesdropping system, like the one that Google is developing, will not have limitations on how much information it can collect and store.

The privacy implications are terrible.

A video that will leave you speechless:

“A partial transcript:

Are there computer programs that can be used to secretly fix elections?

Yes.

How do you know that to be the case?

Because in October of 2000, I wrote a prototype for Congressman Tom Feeney [R-FL]…

It would rig an election?

It would flip the vote, 51-49. Whoever you wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted to win.

And would that program that you designed, be something that elections officials… could detect?

They’d never see it.”

See the video of testimonial here.

Read the shocking affidavit [PDF].

Read an interview with Clinton Curtis.

Read the article on Wired.

Read a shocking article about the issue on 43rdstateblues.com (also has more external links about it).

Read coverage of the Clint Curtis issues at bradblog.com, including the original breaking story.

I discovered an article on Bruce Schneier’s blog that refers to an ABC article about how innocent people are being placed on ‘Watch List’ to meet quota.

From ABC News:

“You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

‘Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft … and they did nothing wrong,’ said one federal air marshal….

What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR?

‘That could have serious impact … They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious,’ said Don Strange, a former agent in charge of air marshals in Atlanta. He lost his job attempting to change policies inside the agency.”

Spychips.com has a couple of interesting PDF files online describing IBM’s patent application: “Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items”:

“A method and system for identifying and tracking persons using RFID-tagged items carried on the persons. Previous purchase records for each person who shops at a retail store are collected by POS terminals and stored in a transaction database. When a person carrying or wearing items having RFID tags enters the store or other designated area, a RFID tag scanner located therein scans the RFID tags on that person and reads the RFID tag information. The RFID tag information collected from the person is correlated with transaction records stored in the transaction database according to known correlation algorithms. Based on the results of the correlation, the exact identity of the person or certain characteristics about the person can be determined. This information is used to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas.”

In short, Big Brother keeps track of all the products that you buy in a database. When you walk into a store, the RFID chips in your clothes, ID cards, credit cards (and later in your implanted chip(s)), will be read by the store’s Big Brother scanners and added to the database. Your identity will be determined, and other sensitive personal data will be cunningly extracted with radio waves.

CNN reports that RFID passports are arriving soon:

“‘Basically, you’ve given everybody a little radio-frequency doodad that silently declares ‘Hey, I’m a foreigner,’” says author and futurist Bruce Sterling, who lectures on the future of RFID technology. “If nobody bothers to listen, great. If people figure out they can listen to passport IDs, there will be a lot of strange and inventive ways to exploit that for criminal purposes.”…

Kidnappers, identity thieves and terrorists could all conceivably commit “contactless” crimes against victims who wouldn’t know they’ve been violated until after the fact…

“The basic problem with RFID is surreptitious access to ID,” said Bruce Schneier security technologist, author and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a technology security consultancy. “The odds are zero that RFID passport technology won’t be hackable.”…

Schneier says there are a number of ways to improve the security of RFID passports but the best trick is to not create RFID passports at all. “Someone in the government got it in their head to make it RFID. Yes, its cool technology,” said Schneier, “but don’t do it because it’s cool.”‘

To read the full CNN article (highly recommended), click here.

RFIDvirus.org talks about how to cause havoc by infecting RFID chips with malicious software:

"Now we get to the scary part. Some airports are planning to expedite baggage handling by attaching RFID-augmented labels to the suitcases as they are checked in. This makes the labels easier to read at greater distances than the current bar-coded baggage labels. Now consider a malicious traveler who attaches a tiny RFID tag, pre-initialized with a virus, to a random person’s suitcase before he checks it in. When the baggage-handling system’s RFID reader scans the suitcase at a Y-junction in the conveyor-belt system to determine where to route it, the tag responds with the RFID virus, which could infect the airport’s baggage database. Then, all RFID tags produced as new passengers check in later in the day may also be infected. If any of these infected bags transit a hub, they will be rescanned there, thus infecting a different airport. Within a day, hundreds of airport databases all over the world could be infected. Merely infecting other tags is the most benign case. An RFID virus could also carry a payload that did other damage to the database, for example, helping drug smugglers or terrorists hide their baggage from airline and government officials, or intentionally sending baggage destined for Alaska to Argentina to create chaos (e.g., as revenge for a recently fired airline employee)."

Imagine the damage that could be done when implanting RFID chips in humans becomes widespread.

RFIDvirus.org has a lot of interesting information about malicious software for RFID chips, including how to write RFID viruses and worms. There is also a page on how to protect RFID chips, but just remember that “hackers” are always going to be busy cracking technology. Your implanted RFID chip will never be 100% “unhackable”.

As mentioned in the last post, humans are already being implanted with RFID chips.

In addition to the severe privacy issues involved with implanting microchips in humans, these RFID chips are also vunerable to viruses and other malicious software:

"RFID tags may become commonplace in the future, but not a lot of people are looking forward to widespread implementation. There was already concern that these “smart barcodes” would allow consumers’ habits to be more easily tracked, and that the technology could facilitate identity theft. It turns out that RFID tags can transmit computer viruses, as well…

‘In our research, we have discovered that if certain vulnerabilities exist in the RFID software, an RFID tag can be (intentionally) infected with a virus and this virus can infect the backend database used by the RFID software. From there it can be easily spread to other RFID tags.’ The paper goes over three possible scenarios in which this could be exploited in a harmful fashion."

Don’t worry. I’m sure that you will be able to buy antivirus software for your implanted chip.

ABC reports about a plan to implant hospital patients with RFID chips:

"In a new test program, Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Jersey plans to implant patients suffering from chronic diseases with a microchip that will give emergency room staff access to their medical information and help avoid costly or serious medical errors, the insurer said on Friday…

…Horizon will test the program for two years to see if it warrants expansion."

Several medical centers have started to "chip" humans:

"Trinitas becomes the sixth hospital that has agreed to adopt the VeriMed System in their emergency department in the last five months and the third hospital in the State of New Jersey to employ the VeriMed System."

VeriChip’ family of companies has be involved in "chipping" 6 million dogs and cats. How long will it be until implanted chips become mandatory? It’s so convenient, and it is for your safety.

To see what it’s going to be like when you get chipped, check out this video of the chip insertion process.

Bruce Schneier writes about how mass surveillance is not an effective way to find terrorists:

"No matter how sophisticated and super-duper are NSA’s methods for identifying terrorists, no matter how big and fast are NSA’s computers, NSA’s accuracy rate will never be 100% and their misidentification rate will never be 0%. That fact, plus the extremely low base-rate for terrorists, means it is logically impossible for mass surveillance to be an effective way to find terrorists…

Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists there as well, which is probably a high estimate. The base-rate would be 1 terrorist per 300,000 people. In percentages, that is .00033%, which is way less than 1%. Suppose that NSA surveillance has an accuracy rate of .40, which means that 40% of real terrorists in the USA will be identified by NSA’s monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls. This is probably a high estimate, considering that terrorists are doing their best to avoid detection. There is no evidence thus far that NSA has been so successful at finding terrorists. And suppose NSA’s misidentification rate is .0001, which means that .01% of innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, at least until they are investigated, detained and interrogated. Note that .01% of the US population is 30,000 people…"