Filtering "Good Girls" and IM Threats

Respecting your kids' right to privacy while wanting to ensure you're aware of the type of people they IM with? Consider a recently launched initiative, IMSafer aims to filter, not spy on kids :

"Keeping children safe from predatory adults in online communication is a service in high demand, but in order for children to participate the parental control needs to be kept to a minimum. IMSafer is a service that launched today and promises to filter IM communication for conversation deemed potentially predatory. The company says it worked with law enforcement specialists to develop its filtering rules and some of them are quite interesting - the phrase “you’re a good girl” is believed to be common language for building a dominance/submission based relationship, for example. Only questionable excerpts from IM conversations will be shown to parents; the company hopes that this relative privacy will help buy-in from kids."

Yet, this is a great example of marginal thinking when it comes to detecting potential child abuse activities with respect to little princess's -- why not prince? -- right to digital privacy. Whereas in the spirit of Web 2.0, the concept is primarily driven by the collective wisdom of parents participating and shaping the service's database and increasing interactions, IMSafer has already predefined categories of alerts :

"1. Someone looking to make direct contact (i.e. coming to your house)
2. Someone looking to make indirect contact (i.e. calling a phone)
3. Personal information (i.e. phone numbers)
4. Obscene language
5. Specific and sexual references to body parts
6. Specific references to sexual acts
7. Anything related to pedophilia"

Issues to keep in mind :
- the differently perceived dangerous or offensive conversation by parents
- the presumption that the "predator" would be using the same username next time, thus establishing long-lasting reputation
- how kids feeling in the middle of a silent war with their parents could simply IM from another location, one without the software installed excluding the possibilities of bypassing it with nerdy talk or vulnerabilities and hacks appearing on-the-fly
- monitors IM only, thus email, IRC, and forums remain an option for further communication

Don't emphasize on spying, not even filtering, but on educating your kids, thus gaining their participation in the process of building awareness on what's are potentially dangerous IM activities. From another perspective, do bored or adventurous kids spend time chatting with strangers? I think boringness, loneliness, the lack of strong, even developed communications with their folks is the root of the problem. And yes, predators acting as online stalkers, thus improving their chances of utilizing a long-lasting conversation.

Related posts:
What's the potential of the IM security market? Symantec thinks big
"IM me" a strike order

Mark Hurd on HP's Surveillance and Disinformation

Straight from the source - HP's CEO, one that compared to Fiorina's qualitative approaches decided to shift the company's strategy to a quantitative internal benchmarking model -- one is always fulfilling the other and vice versa -- and he succeeded, but with today's competitive environment and seek for "the next big thing" some companies are sacrificing productivity for insider fears related investigations. Not that there aren't any, it's just that this particular case is nothing more than a bored top management employee sending signals to the press. Next time it would be a top floor hygiene COO's comments on how HP are definitely up to something given the late hour conference meetings, the press will quote as "an insider source leaked this to us" type of quotation :

"Now the question is do you pick up the document and turn to page whatever, or do you say, 'are you sure?' He says 'I'm sure.' So then you say, 'what are we going to do?' Now let me give you two thoughts. You could react by not confronting the problem. You talk about ethics. We've gone down the backward looking view. There's also the dimension that says, are you going to bury this or confront it. Pretty big question, right? And I want to make something clear. I only know of the facts around the one leak. I don't know, there's been a lot of speculation around tens of leaks, and they associate with this one person [Jay Keyworth, a longtime HP board member]. This fact was about one leak from this one person who is a really good guy in the sense of contributions he made to Hewlett Packard over many years.

So now you're confronted with data that says, great contributor, and the team is looking at Pattie [Then board chairman Patricia Dunn] and saying 'what are you going to do.' And I can tell you if you're looking down at this room as you're making a decision, my first reaction wasn't to say, 'hey Pattie, why don't you look backward at how the data was collected.' The stress was, how are you going to confront the fact that was being presented to you. You're going to do what?

Now to your point, knowing what we know now I wish we'd looked at a different set of facts. But even at that point, what had been done had been done. You'd have been reacting at that point in time. I don't want to shirk any of this. The buck stops with me. But you can't have a CEO of a company our size being the backstop. The thought that I'm going to catch everything -- revenue, costs, personnel decisions, investigations... you know the scale of this company."

Catch up with the case through a previous post on the topic, and keep on reading.

Government Data Mining Programs - Interactive

A very extensive visualization of various U.S government data mining programs :

"Individually, each piece of information gives only a small glimpse into people’s lives -- but over time, these bits of personal information can begin to reveal patterns. Such as the places they go, the products they buy, or perhaps the type of people they associate with.This pattern-recognition process is called “Data Mining” or sometimes “Knowledge Discovery.” Since September 11, the federal government -- especially intelligence and law enforcement agencies -- have turned to data mining programs to make sense of growing oceans of data. The end result isn’t always about discovering what people have done -- but what people might do tomorrow. What does a terrorist look like? What is the culmination of their credit, contacts, purchases and travel? Is it possible that you might share these similar patterns? Chances are at least some of these programs sift through personal information about you."

Go through the questionnaire for a specific case, directly on a program of interest and see its relationship with the rest, if any of course. Go through a previous post on Able Danger's Intelligence Unit Findings Rejected to find out more about the state of information sharing.

Satellite Imagery of Secret or Sensitive Locations

Continuing the Travel Without Moving Series, and a previous post on Open Source North Korean IMINT Reloaded, this collection of Google Earth, Google Maps, Local Live and Yahoo Maps versions of secret or sensitive locations is worth browsing through. Included coordinates for over 80 locations, for instance :

- Predator Drone Returning From Mission
- Predator Drones at Remote Airstrip
- Predator Drone Taking Off From Remote Airstrip
- TAGS 45 'Waters'
- M80 'Stiletto' Stealth Boat
- U-2 Being Readied For Mission
- Underground Hangars at Sunchon Airbase
- North Korean No-Dong Missile Assembly Building
- Former MI6/FCO high security SIGINT enclave at Poudon
- Former NSA/DoD satellite intercept site
- CIA 'Black Site' for terrorist interogations
- Russian Foreign Intelligence (SVR) Headquarters
- CFS Leitrim - Satellite Singal Interception station
- Russian Don-2NP Pill Box Radar
- Star Wars missile defense support site
- AN/FRD-10 Classic Bullseye Antenna
- Radomes on Fort Belvoir
- Northrop "Secret" Research Facility
- Classic Bullseye listening antenna array

As you will find out the data provided is a historical one -- the UAVs and B2s have already dissapeared for instance. Does the publicly obtainable imagery represent a threat to these locations? Not necessarily, as threats from which these facilities were supposed to be protected from have been replaced by ones requiring a different perspective. The dishes however, are still there, listening..

Related posts and resources:
Satellite
Defense
Military
Japan's Reliance on U.S Spy Satellites and Early Warning Missile Systems
Stealth Satellites Developments Source Book
Anti Satellite Weapons