U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens
December 13, 2012By JULIA ANGWIN
Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.
Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens-even people suspected of no crime.
Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.
A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.
Through Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with officials at numerous agencies, The Wall Street Journal has reconstructed the clash over the counterterrorism program within the administration of President Barack Obama. The debate was a confrontation between some who viewed it as a matter of efficiency—how long to keep data, for instance, or where it should be stored—and others who saw it as granting authority for unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full privacy series.
New Tracking Frontier: Your License Plates
September 29, 2012For more than two years, the police in San Leandro, Calif., photographed Mike Katz-Lacabe’s Toyota Tercel almost weekly. They have shots of it cruising along Estudillo Avenue near the library, parked at his friend’s house and near a coffee shop he likes. In one case, they snapped a photo of him and his two daughters getting out of a car in his driveway.
Mr. Katz-Lacabe isn’t charged with, or suspected of, any crime. Local police are tracking his vehicle automatically, using cameras mounted on a patrol car that record every nearby vehicle—license plate, time and location.
“Why are they keeping all this data?” says Mr. Katz-Lacabe, who obtained the photos of his car through a public-records request. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Until recently it was far too expensive for police to track the locations of innocent people such as Mr. Katz-Lacabe. But as surveillance technologies decline in cost and grow in sophistication, police are rapidly adopting them. Private companies are joining, too. At least two start-up companies, both founded by “repo men”—specialists in repossessing cars or property from deadbeats—are currently deploying camera-equipped cars nationwide to photograph people’s license plates, hoping to profit from the data they collect.
The rise of license-plate tracking is a case study in how storing and studying people’s everyday activities, even the seemingly mundane, has become the default rather than the exception. Cellphone-location data, online searches, credit-card purchases, social-network comments and more are gathered, mixed-and-matched, and stored in vast databases.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What The Know series online.
How Grabby Are Your Facebook Apps?
April 7, 2012
The Wall Street Journal analyzed 100 of the most used applications that connect to Facebook’s social-networking platform to see what data they sought from people. The Journal also tested its own Facebook app, WSJ Social. See the apps tested by the Journal, along with the permissions they ask users to grant them.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What The Know series online.
Selling You on Facebook
April 7, 2012Many popular Facebook apps are obtaining sensitive information about users—and users’ friends—so don’t be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places.
The Wall Street Journal, Page W1
A Wall Street Journal examination of 100 of the most popular Facebook apps found that some seek the email addresses, current location and sexual preference, among other details, not only of app users but also of their Facebook friends
Not so long ago, there was a familiar product called software. It was sold in stores, in shrink-wrapped boxes. When you bought it, all that you gave away was your credit card number or a stack of bills.
Now there are “apps”—stylish, discrete chunks of software that live online or in your smartphone. To “buy” an app, all you have to do is click a button. Sometimes they cost a few dollars, but many apps are free, at least in monetary terms. You often pay in another way. Apps are gateways, and when you buy an app, there is a strong chance that you are supplying its developers with one of the most coveted commodities in today’s economy: personal data.
Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
Google’s iPhone Tracking
February 17, 2012Web Giant, Others Bypassed Apple Browser Settings for Guarding Privacy
The Wall Street Journal, Page One
Google Inc. and other advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple Inc.’s Web browser on their iPhones and computers—tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and read the full What They Know series online.
The Surveillance Catalog
November 19, 2011
The Surveillance Catalog allows readers to peruse secret marketing materials published by companies that make tracking equipment.
Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people’s computers and cellphones, and “massive intercept” gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
Stewart Baker: Why Privacy Will Become a Luxury
November 14, 2011Stewart Baker, the former assistant secretary for Homeland Security, talks with Julia Angwin about the need for balancing privacy rights with security concerns. In The Big Interview, Mr. Baker explains why privacy may one day be a luxury available only to the privileged and the rich.
Judges Weigh Phone Tracking
November 9, 2011The Wall Street Journal, Page One
State and federal authorities follow the movements of thousands of Americans each year by secretly monitoring the location of their cellphones, often with little judicial oversight, in a practice facing legal challenges.
Electronic tracking, used by police to investigate such crimes as drug dealing and murder, has become as routine as “looking for fingerprint evidence or DNA evidence,” said Gregg Rossman, a prosecutor in Broward County, Fla.
The use of cellphone tracking by authorities is among the most common types of electronic surveillance, exceeding wiretaps and the use of GPS tracking, according to a survey of local, state and federal authorities by The Wall Street Journal.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
Secret Orders Target Email
October 10, 2011WikiLeaks’ Backer’s Information Sought
The Wall Street Journal, Page One
The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
Plus, more on Sonic.net, the little ISP that stood up to the government.
Latest in Web Tracking: Stealthy ‘Supercookies’
August 19, 2011The Wall Street Journal, Page One
Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people’s online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, new research shows.
The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional “cookie,” a small file that websites routinely install on users’ computers to help track their activities online. Hulu and MSN were installing files known as “supercookies,” which are capable of re-creating users’ profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
Device Raises Fear of Facial Profiling
August 16, 2011The Wall Street Journal, Page One
Dozens of law-enforcement agencies from Massachusetts to Arizona are preparing to outfit their forces with controversial hand-held facial-recognition devices as soon as September, raising significant questions about privacy and civil liberties.
With this device, made by BI2 Technologies, an officer can snap a picture of a face from up to five feet away, or scan a person’s irises from up to six inches away.
With the device, which attaches to an iPhone, an officer can snap a picture of a face from up to five feet away, or scan a person’s irises from up to six inches away, and do an immediate search to see if there is a match with a database of people with criminal records. The gadget also collects fingerprints.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
Web’s Hot New Commodity: Privacy
February 27, 2011The Wall Street Journal, Page One
As the surreptitious tracking of Internet users becomes more aggressive and widespread, tiny start-ups and technology giants alike are pushing a new product: privacy.Companies including Microsoft Corp., McAfee Inc.—and even some online-tracking companies themselves—are rolling out new ways to protect users from having their movements monitored online. Some are going further and starting to pay people a commission every time their personal details are used by marketing companies.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
Your Digital Fingerprint
November 30, 2010Companies are developing digital fingerprint technology to identify how we use our computers, mobile devices and TV set-top boxes. WSJ’s Simon Constable talks to Julia Angwin about the next generation of tracking tools.
Race Is On to ‘Fingerprint’ Phones, PCs
November 30, 2010The Wall Street Journal, Page One
IRVINE, Calif.—David Norris wants to collect the digital equivalent of fingerprints from every computer, cellphone and TV set-top box in the world.
BlueCava CEO David Norris plans to fingerprint billions of devices. Tracking cookies ‘are a joke,’ he says.
He’s off to a good start. So far, Mr. Norris’s start-up company, BlueCava Inc., has identified 200 million devices. By the end of next year, BlueCava says it expects to have cataloged one billion of the world’s estimated 10 billion devices.
Advertisers no longer want to just buy ads. They want to buy access to specific people. So, Mr. Norris is building a “credit bureau for devices” in which every computer or cellphone will have a “reputation” based on its user’s online behavior, shopping habits and demographics. He plans to sell this information to advertisers willing to pay top dollar for granular data about people’s interests and activities.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on Web
October 11, 2010The Wall Street Journal, Page One
At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its “Mood” discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.
It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was “scraping,” or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe’s private online forums.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
One Smart Cookie
August 4, 2010
New York ad company [x+1] made predictions about users based on just one click on a website. This interactive shows the company’s assumptions about users and how they affected what credit cards were shown.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
On the Web’s Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only
August 3, 2010The Wall Street Journal, Page One
You may not know a company called [x+1] Inc., but it may well know a lot about you.
From a single click on a web site, [x+1] correctly identified Carrie Isaac as a young Colorado Springs parent who lives on about $50,000 a year, shops at Wal-Mart and rents kids’ videos. The company deduced that Paul Boulifard, a Nashville architect, is childless, likes to travel and buys used cars. And [x+1] determined that Thomas Burney, a Colorado building contractor, is a skier with a college degree and looks like he has good credit.
The company didn’t get every detail correct. But its ability to make snap assessments of individuals is accurate enough that Capital One Financial Corp. uses [x+1]‘s calculations to instantly decide which credit cards to show first-time visitors to its website.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
Sites Feed Personal Details to New Tracking Industry
July 30, 2010
The Wall Street Journal, Page A1
The largest U.S. websites are installing new and intrusive consumer-tracking technologies on the computers of people visiting their sites—in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time—a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
The tracking files represent the leading edge of a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers who are in effect establishing a new business model for the Internet: one based on intensive surveillance of people to sell data about, and predictions of, their interests and activities, in real time.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal. See the interactive database accompanying the article and see the full What They Know series online.
The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
July 30, 2010A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series.
The Wall Street Journal, Page W1
Ashley Hayes-Beaty
Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty’s computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.
The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995-e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn. The code knows that her favorite movies include “The Princess Bride,” “50 First Dates” and “10 Things I Hate About You.” It knows she enjoys the “Sex and the City” series. It knows she browses entertainment news and likes to take quizzes.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal and see the full What They Know series online.
Who Owns Your Name on Twitter?
May 19, 2009The Wall Street Journal, The Decoder column
Social networks can be friendly places, but they are not democracies. Nor are they free markets. They are authoritarian regimes with whimsical and arbitrary rules.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.
Facebook: Can It Be Tamed?
April 21, 2009The Wall Street Journal, The Decoder column
My Facebook account is becoming unmanageable. It’s filled with updates, notifications, messages, wall postings, pokes, notes, friend requests and group requests (and that’s just a small sampling of it all). My Facebook correspondents range from professional contacts, to friends and family, to people I don’t really know at all.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.
Recipe for a Successful Viral Video Campaign
February 17, 2009The Wall Street Journal, The Decoder column
When Judson Laipply posted his six-minute “Evolution of Dance” video to YouTube in April of 2006, he didn’t advertise it at all. One month later, someone noticed his frenzied moves and e-mailed it to a friend. That friend e-mailed to other friends and more than 100 million views later, the rest is history. “It was all just pure luck” Mr. Laipply says.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.
A Problem for Hot Web Outfits: Keeping Pages Free From Porn
May 16, 2006To Help MySpace Sell Ads, Photo Site Hires Checkers And Tests Software Filters
The Wall Street Journal, Page One
DENVER — Working quickly, Photobucket.com employee Jeff Gers can look at nearly 150,000 images on his computer screen during an eight-hour shift, or about 300 a minute. His job is to find and destroy anything that might cause offense, a task that’s getting harder all the time.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.
Elusive Spammer Sends EarthLink on Long Chase
May 7, 2003Web Service Uses Lawyers, Private Eyes To Track Buffalo Sender of Junk E-Mails
The Wall Street Journal, Page One
ATLANTA — For more than a year, Mary Youngblood has been chasing the “Buffalo Spammer.”
The 34-year-old Ms. Youngblood, who sports a picture of Darth Vader on her company ID badge, works at the headquarters of EarthLink Inc., a bigInternet-access provider. She leads a team of more than a dozen investigators whose job it is to find spammers, hackers and other “bad guys” who haunt the company’s network.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal.