Battle hots up for the control and gaining of intelligence

Cyberspace is increasingly attracting the attention of governments across the globe, be it to block certain undesirable network traffic; trying to milk it of intelligence for national security purposes; or to control political/propaganda messages. In the latest developments, two major players – Google and BlackBerry, and the European Parliament – have been sucked into controversies as individual privacy and commercial confidentiality are increasingly coming under pressure.

Earlier this year, information came into the public domain that Google has co-provided seeding capital with the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s investment arm for a company that purportedly monitors the Web in real time, gathers information from just about every nook and cranny of the Internet, and then predicts future events.

On 1 August, an agreement between the US and the European Union came into effect, which gives the US access to particulars of international bank transaction data as part of the ongoing war on terrorism.

Last week, Canadian company Research in Motion (RIM) – manufacturer of the BlackBerry communication device that is popular for its security features, protecting the privacy and confidentiality of network communication – reportedly declared itself willing to block pornography sites and allow government agents to spy on its users.

This followed moves by the Saudi Arabia to ban some of its key services with more come from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and elsewhere.

Google

In the case of Google, it came to light that last year it invested along with the CIA’s In-Q-Tel (IQT) investment arm in a company called Recorded Futures (FR). The company scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to establish relationships between people, organisations, actions and incidents in the present and to come. It claims that its temporal analytics engine goes beyond search by “looking at the invisible links between documents that talk about the same, or related entities and events.”

According to a report on the website of the Information Clearing House, FR “strips from Web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (special and temporal analysis) and the tone of the document (sentiment analysis). Then it applies some artificial intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between players. RF maintains an index of more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living Web.”

According to the report, both IQT and Google have seats on the RF board.

“In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s (Google’s) political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents... Customers largely have trusted the company so far because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledge not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

“But unease has been growing. Thirty seven (US) state attorneys-general are demanding answers from the company after Google hovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident),” it is reported.

The Swift agreement

The European Parliament in early July formally adopted the EU-US Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) Agreement. The antiterrorist finance tracking provisions of the Agreement apply to financial messaging data held in Europe by international providers operating in the EU and the US.

Most of the world’s bank transactions are transmitted by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift), based in Belgium.

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) initially rejected the original agreement that would have seen the bulk transfer of data to the US. Since, certain safeguards have been negotiated with the European Council and the US Treasury Department.

In exchange for backing the agreement, MEPs won an undertaking that works on setting up an EU equivalent to the US TFTP – which would preclude the need for bulk data transfers – which will start within 12 months. Once Europe has a system enabling it to analyse data on its own territory, it need only transfer data relating to a specific terrorist track.

The new version of the agreement further provides that the use of data by the Americans, which must be exclusively for counterterrorism purposes, is to be supervised by a group of independent inspectors, including someone appointed by the European Commission. This person will be entitled to request justification before any data is used, and to block any searches that he/she considers illegitimate.

The agreement prohibits the US TFTP from engaging in data mining or any other type of algorithmic or automated profiling or computer filtering. Any searches of Swift data will have to be based on existing information showing that the object of the search relates to terrorism or terrorism finance.

When the original draft agreement came onto the table, Peter Hustinx, supervisor of the European Data Protection Supervisor agency, said: “I am fully aware that the fight against terrorism and terrorism financing may require restrictions to the right to the protection of personal data. However, in view of the intrusive nature of the draft agreement, which allows transfers of data in bulk to the US, the necessity of such a scheme should first be unambiguously established."

BlackBerry

At the time of writing this article, the saga between RIM and the Saudi Arabia was still ongoing as attempts were being made to find a way to deal with Saudi authorities concerns about national security and about undesirable content such as pornography.

Like the UAE, India has applied pressure on national security ground, and RIM agreed to allow security authorities there to monitor BlackBerry services. It agreed to block 3 000 pornographic sites on request of Kuwaiti authorities.

Saudi Arabia reportedly had asked service providers to cut off instant messaging service, Messenger.

On 6 August, Turkey’s telecommunications regulator said there are “serious” security weaknesses related to BlackBerry services in the country, adding that it has set up a committee to look into the matter.

It can be expected that the cyberspace battleground will be the source of news for some time to come, and is likely to rather hot up than calm down soon.