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Anonymous #1

Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy
    #13018062 - 08/07/10 04:44 PM (13 years, 6 months ago)

You are being watched and tracked.
The government knows it can't legally do 95% of what it's doing, so it used "private" entities to do all the work.

The original article expressed alarm over the details of this.

EDIT
However, "Project Vigilant" has been revealed to be either a hoax, or has waved their magic conspiracy wand and caused the author to retract all of his original story.

Setting the record straight--

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/05/surveillance/index.html


Quote:

Re-visiting Project Vigilant
Quote:


By Glenn Greenwald






On Monday, I wrote about the expanding private surveillance industry and its relationship with the government, with a focus on something called Project Vigilant as one particularly troubling, illustrative example.  That group's Executive Director, Chet Uber, generated substantial media attention -- in Forbes, Wired and elsewhere -- by appearing at a Defcon conference this weekend and claiming, among other things, that it was he who put Adrian Lamo in touch with his contacts at the "highest levels of the government" at "three letter agencies."  He further boasted that Project Vigilant is a group which "monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers," "tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can 'develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address,'" and then "hands much of that information to federal agencies."  The reasons these revelations would be alarming are obvious, and Law Professor Orin Kerr suggested that such activities would likely be illegal.

But over the past several days, I've become convinced that Uber's claims about his group are wildly exaggerated, rendering my concerns about it largely misguided and unwarranted.  In a follow-up post, Kerr points to and tentatively endorses this analysis from Richard Bejlitch, who makes a persuasive case that Project Vigilant is "largely a publicity stunt, meaning it was just invented and its so-called 'history' is an extension of someone's imagination."  I also had several email exchanges with Cato's Julian Sanchez, who spent the last several days investigating Project Vigilant and Uber's claims and -- for reasons he will detail in a piece he is writing -- also concluded that concerns about this group are largely unwarranted.  Numerous, knowledgeable readers -- both in the comment section to that post and via email -- have also offered compelling arguments as to why it's far more likely than not that Uber is basically engaged in a self-aggrandizing, attention-seeking campaign (not unlike Adrian Lamo), and thus, to put it mildly, is seriously hyping the importance of his group and what it does.

Anyone with even minimal credibility knows not to believe uncorroborated, fantastical claims simply because they are publicly touted.  What persuaded me of the authenticity of Uber's claims -- aside from their being reported in the above-mentioned credible publications by reporters who regularly cover surveillance issues -- were these two articles from last month in The Examiner by Mark Albertson, covering Project Vigilant at length.  Indeed, the second one was specifically devoted to addressing doubts about its seriousness:

    It’s tempting to look at a secret group of cybercrime "monitors" and dismiss them as a group of lightweights trying to play cops and robbers in the Internet world. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The article identified numerous, sophisticated Internet experts -- former officials of the DOJ, DHS, the NSA and the New York Stock Exchange -- who were purportedly working with them.  All of this evidence together led me to conclude that the group was real and credible.  I interpreted my inability to gather more information about them -- including by speaking that morning with surveillance experts who had never heard of them, and attempting to find out background information about them and the corporation which "funds" it only to come up largely empty -- as simply a reflection of how covertly they operated.  In retrospect, I should have been more skeptical of these claims.

In sum, the dangers of the growing private surveillance industry and its increasing commercial relationship with the U.S. government are every bit as real and severe as I described.  But "Project Vigilant" is probably not an example of that.

* * * * *

On a related note, Luke Shepard of Facebook contacted me -- in comments and via email -- and asked that I direct readers' attention to this post, which he says provides some clarity on the relationship between The Washington Post and Facebook, which I also mentioned in what I wrote.





Edited by Anonymous (08/10/10 07:51 PM)


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Invisiblecreamcorn
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Registered: 03/13/06
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Re: Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy [Re: Anonymous #1] * 1
    #13029920 - 08/10/10 12:29 AM (13 years, 6 months ago)

See the very last sentence of all that?  Click the 'see here' and read where the author takes it all back, realizing he fell for some nonsense. :cool:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/05/surveillance/index.html

I'm always skeptical of this sky is falling crap myself. I don't believe it's all unicorns & rainbows behind the scenes here in the ol' US of A, no no i'm not naive... but i know a bit about the technology... and given the signal to noise ratio of 16 year old girls on facebook, cute animal videos on youtube, porn, et cetera... point is we're just not at a point to monitor everyone, and more importantly, FILTER that information to make meaning out of it. it just doesn't work that way. it's sci-fi. what you see today, is the people that slip up and do something dumb that get caught. they aren't picked out of the haystack. i'm not saying it will always be that way, technology moves fast, but it's got a long, long way to go to get there from here.

compound it with a simple fact, bad guys know what encryption is... (as do the good guys, wikileaks has mechanisms in place to submit encrypted leaks)... there's stuff an average person can use that will have the most powerful supercomputers spinning their wheels for a while. you can't even begin to filter traffic until it's decrypted... a simple analogy - it'd be like trying to put together a puzzle, without knowing what it was a picture of - and without even taking it out of the box first. you can't do this in "real time" with one person as of now; how do you expect a nation-full? as of now they target a person first, then investigate... it's just too intensive yet, to target a "behavior" or a "crime" on a massive scale, then single that out the information flow. doesn't mean there's not situations where in controlled scale, focused conditions, it can't be done to some extent... but it can't be applied in very large scales, yet. (just think of those computer phone operators or those cars with the voice activated crap... think of how many times the damn thing turns your window wipers on when you were asking to skip songs on your ipod :wink: ... yet folks will believe we have or are near magic capabilities to monitor, transcribe, and analyze, millions of phone conversations in dozens of languages, simultaneously in real time, for example? somebody tell the military, because they still use rooms full of translators listening to recordings...)

anyway, it leads to a third long winded point... to get the kind of scale NOW would require massive cooperation from many; and unfortunately for the story, its the law of conspiracy theories... the more people you need or supposedly have involved, the greater the chance the whole thing is bunk. im sorry but in all those major corporations, all those volunteers, nobody thought to blow the whistle themselves on the sort of thing? nobody cares about living in a country that respects citizen's privacy? whenever i see something like "10,000 members" ... "the list is kept secret" ... red flags... :smile:

i saw on a BBC documentary not too long ago - one on internet privacy, the name escapes... they talked with one of those ad tracking companies - you know the ones that slip cookies in your web browser to put together a profile on you - to in turn, target marketing at you?  UK's law enforcement actually tried contacting THEM on several occasions for information on suspects, in tracking crimes. if anything, there's less privacy in the UK (ever been to London? walk a city block and count the security cameras... you'll run out of fingers) but this is telling, that their government doesn't have dossiers on their citizens and their best idea so far is to wring it out of private companies who collected it for wholly other purposes... and i think it teaches an important lesson... it might be the googles and facebooks of the world to keep an eye on... there's your intelligence gathering agency right there, doing it out in the open, with your consent and cooperation... when the government makes demands for their data, be afraid... moral of the story - dont get hung up on the stuff in the shadows... because you'll quite possibly miss that we're watching tomorrow's grow before your eyes in plain sight today...

here's food for thought: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/


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Anonymous #2

Re: Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy [Re: creamcorn]
    #13030099 - 08/10/10 01:35 AM (13 years, 6 months ago)

who's to say he wasn't contacted by some 3 letter entity and prodded to take back what was said?

:strokebeard:


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Anonymous #3

Re: Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy [Re: Anonymous #1]
    #13030782 - 08/10/10 08:38 AM (13 years, 6 months ago)

dr_gonz goes anonymous.


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Anonymous #1

Re: Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy [Re: Anonymous #3]
    #13033416 - 08/10/10 07:38 PM (13 years, 6 months ago)

Thank you for the follow-up creamcorn-- I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the original article was disturbing-- I think you would agree.

Anyone attached to Lamo must be a fraud, come to think of it-- that freakshow of a human is far past creepy...

Correcting the OP with this update


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