30 July 2007

The Matricula


Admiral McConnell's people had a big conference two weeks ago at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. It was about open-source intelligence, which is that information that is laying around for free, no Spooks or satellites required.

They say that almost a thousand professionals attended, and I wish I had. There are some real issues about what is happening to the American media, and the cut-back in the number of qualified foreign correspondents. It seems that thin profit margins have driven most of the media to the point that they just air-drop reporters into big breaking stories to save costs, and they don't really know much more than we do.

National Public Radio has outsourced their best coverage to the venerable BBC, and it is refreshing to get a quality perspective on what is going on.

The point is that there used to be a much better quality of understanding available for discussion on what things mean in the wide world, when we are not focused exclusively on what Lindsey Lohan is up to, or Brittney. Paris is still pretty well covered, but the bad news is that it is Paris Hilton.

I was thinking a lot about that on the grand adventure to the Antipodes last month. Paris had just reported to jail the night I flew into Canberra. I heard all about it in baggage claim on arrival, so I knew that concentration on trash is not exclusively an American vice.

It is fun. I was able to follow the story down there, too, when I was not whimpering about the rain and wishing I had gloves in the winter chill.

I was down there to make recommendations on what sort of open source data might be applicable to the government's immigration scheme. Due to privacy concerns, the Immigration side of the house had determined that confirmation of Identity was the key to the whole thing; the thought being that if they really and truly knew who they were dealing with, they could make rational decisions on access to the country.

The problem is real. They have the same problem we do, though since they live on a gigantic island, their problem is more pristine than ours.   They have to deal with visa-shoppers and entire nations (notably Indonesia) whose standards for passport issue are on a par with the Mexican consulate identification cards is here, which is to say just about nil.

The Matricula Consular can be obtained with a simple bogus birth certificate. It is not a US document, but it is widely accepted as an entry document to gain others requiring confirmed identity, such as drivers licenses. Eventually the interlocking grid of identification can be use to gain a social security card, which is the key to the kingdom for benefits.

That was the other problem that identity was supposed to deal with, since it would determine status and eligibility. The government wanted to find a useful way to check for with: fraud in the social benefits system. I considered that universal information sharing between the agencies would make malfeasance much easier to detect, but such a development really alarmed the privacy community.

I suggested an open-source approach to identity that had a lot of   nuance. As a nation founded by convicts, they are understandably skittish about undue government intrusion. The cooperation between Immigration and ASIO- their MI-5 equivalent that does not have a direct equivalent in the States- was plagued by the same sort of issues as our system has.

On the high side of the security fence, they preferred to err on the side of warning. Practically, that left the thorny resolution process to be cleaned up and resolved by the over-stressed and harried low side process in Immigration.

I wondered if the examination of open source media provide a means to contextualize identity? After all, the recent Doctor's Plot in London and Glasgow was engineered by people whose identities were confirmed. So were their credentials.

I do not know if how the connection between the members of the cell originated, whether it was in the UK in a mosque or originated in the schools in South Asia where they did their professional training.

In any event, I suggested that context required much more data than they currently had. There was no choice, really, since you could not bar people on the basis of their religion. The only way to make smart choices was to really understand the cultural institutions of the nations involved, starting with the ideological orientation of individual schools.

There was an analogous problem that was legendary in the Department. In fact, it had broken the system. There was a warning that popped up on the computer screen of the officer at the immigration desk at the Sydney airport. It was supposed to help the officer in the forty seconds he had to make a decision about whether to let someone into the country.

In this case, it read: "Warning! Indonesian passports might be bogus!"

Like a Matricula presented to an LA police officer- Duh!

A warning so general in nature is of no help to the harried officer behind the glass, and in fact is worse than nothing, since over time he or she will just ignore it.

It is clear that we need more data and more context to understand things in our global village. The question is what kind. Congress has its knickers in a knot over data-mining at the National Security Agency, which is entangled in the FISA debate, and the overseas telephone monitoring program and the testimony of the Attorney General about all of them.

 I have no knowledge of what actually was/is being done, though I am as afraid of the Equifax Credit Bureau as I am of NSA knowing too much. Of course, the former is legal and the latter....well...that is troubling.

Accordingly, I think it might be useful to distinguish what you can glean from open media (print, press, radio, television, internet) versus individual information from credit bureaus and the phone companies. It is a subtle distinction, but until we figure out where we are on privacy, it may be the distinction that enables us to go forward in a manner that will help determine the context of who we are dealing with.

There is already some fabulous associational software out there that can glean all sorts of associational information about people, particularly US citizens, since we are so wired together with public records.

It is all legal, by the way. The Gaming industry is Vegas was one of the early proponents of the technology, since to preserve profit they had to be able to identify cheaters in the casinos. If they were able to take the sharks out of the pool, the ones who have relationships with the dealers, it made the house percentage secure.

The Aussies are quite happy that they have no land borders, by the way. I don't know what the answer is, but an approach to survey all that media out there, in local languages, and associate the data in a useful manner may be the only way provide the IC and law enforcement with the insight they need while preserving the Constitution.

I am a little lost of where we stand these days on that.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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