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LONDON – British officials have given their word: "We won't read youremails." But experts say that its proposed new surveillance program,unveiled last week as part of the government's annual legislativeprogram, will gather so much data that spooks won't have to readyour messages to guess what you're up to. The U.K. Home Office stresses that it is not seeking to read thecontent of every Britons' communications, saying the data it wasseeking "is NOT the content of any communication." It is, however,seeking information on who's sending the message, whom it's sentto, where it's sent from, and potentially other details including amessage's length and its format. The government's proposal is just a draft bill, so it could bemodified or scrapped. But if passed in its current form, it wouldput a huge amount of personal data at the government's disposal,which it could potentially use to deduce a startling amount aboutBritons' private life — from sleep patterns to driving habitsor even infidelity. "We're really entering a whole new phase of analysis based on thedata that we can collect," said Gerald Kane, an information systemsexpert at Boston College. "There is quite a lot you can learn." The ocean of information is hard to fathom. Britons generate 4billion hours of voice calls and 130 billion text messagesannually, according to industry figures. In 2008 the BBC put theannual number of U.K.-linked emails at around 1 trillion. Thenthere are instant messaging services run by companies such asBlackBerry, Internet telephony services such as Skype, chat rooms,and in-game services liked those used by World of Warcraft. Communications service providers, who would log the details of allthat back-and-forth, believe that the government's program wouldforce them to process petabytes (1 quadrillion bytes) ofinformation every day. It's a mind-bogglingly large amount of dataon the scale of every book, every movie, and every piece of musicever released. So even without opening emails, how much can British spooks learnabout who's sending them? THEY'LL SEE THE RED FLAGS Do you know how fast you were going? Your phone does. If you sent a first text from London before stepping behind thewheel, and a second one from a service station outside Manchesteronly three hours later, authorities could infer that you broke thespeed limit to cover the roughly 200 miles which separate the two. Crunching location data and communications patterns gives aremarkable rich view of a person's lives — and theirmisadventures. Ken Altshuler, of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers,raves about the benefits which smartphones and social media havebrought to savvy divorce attorneys. Lawyers don't needsophisticated data mining software to spot evidence of infidelityor hints of hidden wealth when they review phone records or texttraffic, he said. "One name, one phone number that's not on our client's radar, andour curiosity is piqued," he said. The more the communication— a late-night text sent to a work colleague, an unexplainedinternational phone call — is out of character, "the more ofa red flag we see." THEY'LL KNOW HOW YOU'RE SLEEPING The ebb and flow of electronic communication — that call toyour mother just before bed, that early-morning email to your bosssaying you'll be late — frames our waking lives. "You can figure somebody's sleep patterns, their weekly pattern ofwork," said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University machine learningexpert. In 2006, he helped found New York-based Sense Networks,which crunches phone data to do just that. Jebara said that calls made from the same location between 9 and 5are a good indication of where a person works; the frequency ofemail traffic to or from a person's work account is a good hint ofhis or her work ethic; dramatic changes to a person's electronicroutine might suggest a promotion — or a redundancy. "You can quickly figure out when somebody lost their job," Jebarasaid, adding: "Credit card companies have been interested in thatfor a while." THEY'LL KNOW WHO'S THE BOSS Drill down, and communication can reveal remarkably richinformation. For example, does office worker A answer office workerB's missives within minutes of the message being sent? Does B oftenleave colleagues' emails unanswered for hours on end? If so, Bprobably stands for "boss." That's an example of what Jebara's Columbia colleagues described as"automated social hierarchy detection," a technique which can inferwho gives the orders, who's respected, and who's ignored basedpurely on whose emails get answered and how quickly. In 2007 fourof them analyzed traffic taken from the Enron Corporation's emailarchive to correctly guess the seniority of several top-levelmanagers. Intelligence agencies may not need such tools to untangle corporateflowcharts, but identifying ringleaders becomes more important whentracking a suspected terrorist cell. "If you piece together the chain of influence, then you can findthe central authority," he said. "You can figure that out withoutlooking at the content." THEY'LL KNOW WHO YOU'RE TALKING TO Seeing how networks of people communicate isn't just about findingyour boss, it's about figuring out who are your friends. Programs already exist to determine the density of communications— something that can identify close groups of friends orfamily without even knowing who's who. If one user is identified assuspicious, then the users closest to him or her might get a secondlook as well. "Let's say we find out somebody in the U.K. is a terrorist," saidKane. "You know exactly who he talks to on almost every channel, soBOOM you know his 10 closest contacts. Knowing that information notonly allows you to go to his house, but allows you to go to theirhouses as well." A SNOOPER'S CHARTER? Detective work at the stroke of a key is clearly attractive to spyagencies. British officialdom has been pushing for the masssurveillance program for years, but civil libertarians areperturbed, branding the proposal a "snooper's charter." Kane said that the surveillance regime had to be seen in thecontext of social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, wherehundreds of millions of people were constantly volunteeringinformation about themselves, their friends, their family and theircolleagues. "There's no sense in getting all Big Brother-ish that there arelegitimate safeguards in place," he said. "The bottom line is thatwe're all leaving digital trails, everywhere, all the time. Thewhole concept of privacy is shifting daily.". We are high quality suppliers, our products such as 3D Ready HDMI Cable , China Optical Fiber Connectors for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits HDMI Cables 1.4.
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