FaceBook re-named FaceSpook.
"Facebook, the world’s top social media platform, is reportedly seeking to hire hundreds of employees with US national security clearance licenses."
"If that plan, reported by Bloomberg, sounds sinister, that’s because it is."
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/407078-facebook-social-media-intelligence-censorship/

 

The article reads in part:
"As Bloomberg reports: “Workers with such [national security] clearances can access information classified by the US government. Facebook plans to use these people – and their ability to receive government information about potential threats – in the company’s attempt to search more proactively for questionable social media campaigns ahead of elections.”

That is pure nonsense. Typical of Bloomberg leaving out important details. As written above the single paragraph leads one to believe anyone with a US Government clearance can access any and all classified material which could not be farther from the truth. For just about my entire career I worked under both a DoD (Department of Defense) and a DoE (Department of Energy) secret clearance. Along with having a clearance which come in several levels there is also a need to know clause. For example when we had visitors to my facility, already cleared through security I was limited in what I could discuss with them. The mere fact that a person also held for example a DoE clearance did not mean I could openly discuss the travel rate of speed of a control rod drive mechanism as used in a reactor core of a US Navy Nuclear submarine. Unless they had a "Need to Know" their clearance meant nothing. The article, in my humble opinion is fear mongering on the part of Bloomberg because it fails to mention much of anything. Access to anything classified is granted expressly on the need to know clause and less a need to know you get nothing regardless of clearance level.

Just My Take....
Ron

 

This whole 'Russia used social media' theme is ridiculous in an era when billions are spent on elections by parties. The next thing you know there will be reports of Russian Pokemon Go tactics.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-pokemon-go-police-brutality-us-a7997761.html

I don't know how Privacy could be lost on FaceBook when it's already open to the world to see what an idiot you are for posting something private there.

 

This whole 'Russia used social media' theme is ridiculous in an era when billions are spent on elections by parties. The next thing you know there will be reports of Russian Pokemon Go tactics.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-pokemon-go-police-brutality-us-a7997761.html

I don't know how Privacy could be lost on FaceBook when it's already open to the world to see what an idiot you are for posting something private there.

That was seriously good as well as humorous.

Ron

 

Until now, making a computer discern a conversation among many in a crowd seemed like an impossible task:

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ed-how-to-pick-a-single-voice-out-of-a-crowd/

 

Why am I not surprised to learn that the Chinese are the first to come up with something like this?

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ina-tracks-every-citizen-and-yours-could-too/

Using AI to optimise Hangzhou has had many positive effects. Traffic congestion is down, road accidents are automatically detected and responded to faster, and illegal parking is tracked in real time. If someone breaks the law, they too can be tracked throughout the city before being picked up by the police. “In China, people have less concern with privacy, which allows us to move faster,”
[/QUOTE ]

 

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/us_military_spying_archive_exposed/

Three misconfigured AWS S3 buckets have been discovered wide open on the public internet containing "dozens of terabytes" of social media posts and similar pages – all scraped from around the world by the US military to identify and profile persons of interest.

The archives were found by veteran security breach hunter UpGuard's Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and these ones weren't exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive.
...
Before you start scrabbling for your tinfoil hats, the army hasn't made a secret of Coral Reef, even broadcasting the awards the software has won. And social media monitoring isn't anything new, either.

However, it is disturbing quite how easily this material was to find, how poorly configured it was, and that the archives weren't even given innocuous names. If America's enemies – or to be honest, anyone at all – are looking for intelligence, these buckets were a free source of information to mine.

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...etter-pictures-but-less-privacy-idUSKBN1DG2XF

Current televisions cannot carry the new signal and the FCC on Thursday said it was only requiring broadcasting both signals for five years after deploying the next-generation technology.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc last month called the new standard “the Holy Grail” for the advertiser because it tells them who is watching and where.

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...etter-pictures-but-less-privacy-idUSKBN1DG2XF

This just made me remember when my wife was asked to use a box designed to allow advertisers to see what we watched and what channels, we actually got paid for it. 2 years in a row.

They didn't get much from it, being an average customer most of the time the kids watched Nickelodeon or Disney before and after school, late night was the news and off by 10pm.

Now we pay them to allow data about an average person personal preferances, I wouldn't even blink at the possibility they have cameras built in to see our expressions and microphones to hear our responses. Back in the day it was good enough to know which channel you prefer now days they want it all.

kv

 

When did having a security clearance automatically gave you access?

Facebook hiring cleared people might be for a future government contract or they could be hiring H1B that have been cleared for confidential. I know a doctorial student who needed a confidential clearance for his internship. That clearance paid dividends when he was hired by a motor City corporation.

Facebook could be doing the same, but that is not as sexy as the rt article. Some really enjoy mindf@#$ing. RT is having a good time doing it.

 

When did having a security clearance automatically gave you access?

Facebook hiring cleared people might be for a future government contract or they could be hiring H1B that have been cleared for confidential. I know a doctorial student who needed a confidential clearance for his internship. That clearance paid dividends when he was hired by a motor City corporation.

Facebook could be doing the same, but that is not as sexy as the rt article. Some really enjoy mindf@#$ing. RT is having a good time doing it.

Yeah, this surfaced a few weeks or maybe months ago in the local rag of a newspaper with a link to Bloomberg. The Bloomberg article reads in part:

"Workers with such clearance can access information classified by the U.S. government. Facebook plans to use these people -- and their ability to receive government information about potential threats -- to search more proactively for questionable social media campaigns ahead of elections, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is sensitive. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.

Job candidates like this are often former government and intelligence officials or contractors. The status can carry over to private-sector jobs, as long as the position still requires access to sensitive information. Previously granted clearances become inactive when intelligence workers leave government employment, but they can be reactivated on Facebook’s behalf, the person said".

Whoever comes up with nonsense should be dragged out in a field and shot. People are so gullible. Security clearances are based on a Need to Know among other things. The fact that someone has a security clearance be it confidential or secret in classification means nothing. To gain access to classified data a person must have a Need to Know regarding that information.

When we had visitors at our facility they either had or were granted interim clearance to be in the facility. Unless these visitors had a Need to Know I was not at liberty to discuss much of anything with the exception of the weather. Now if I personally signed in a visitor from another government facility so we could meet and discuss a product issue or testing problem then yes, they had a Need to Know so in a secure area we could speak freely.

Clearances are also broken down by not just level but department such as DoD (Department of Defense) Confidential or Secret or DoE (Department of Energy) for example "Q" type clearance. In perspective A Q Clearance (or Q-type clearance) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) security clearance that is roughly comparable to a United States Department of Defense Top Secret clearance with Sensitive Compartmentalized Information and Compartmentalized can bring us back around to the Need to Know.

The problem is when the media in their bliss and ignorance attempt to inform an uninformed public of what they think they know. While I lived everything I just typed every bit of it can be found with a Google search. Gawd I despise the media and people who believe everything they read in the media. A little research on the part or readers would go a long way.

Ron

 

We need to break up these robber barons.

 

Just because you "can" doesn't mean they give you the "need to know." Facebook would have to be under government contract to have the "need to know" specific information, not everything in the U.S. Government. Those on here with security clearances, even lapsed ones, know the basic rules.

Being "cleared" for such information isn't the same as "having access". Can have access is not the need to know.

The corporate profit for running the Savanna River Project during the WWII was $1.00. Cost plus $1.00.

Also, remember that Harry Truman didn't find out about the Manhattan Project till he was sworn in as President. The Secretary of War apologized for not reading him in, but at the time, he didn't have the need to know. Harry Truman understood the reasoning and accepted it.

 

Want some irony? This form is one of several which are completed when applying for or renewing a security clearance. I believe it was either every 5 or every 10 years a clearance needed renewed. Typically it takes 6 months and following 9/11 it was taking over a year. So shortly after I retired and had my security debrief I get a letter in the mail from the US Government. It seems the data on those forms "may" have been compromised" so we get a few years of finance monitoring free to help prevent identity theft. Silly me I thought all of that information would have been safe. To make matters worse the government obviously went with the lowest bidder. Go figure.

<EDIT> I forgot to link to the form. So I fixed it. Note the wealth of private information. </EDIT>

Ron

 

Why am I not surprised that big data would eventually betray us all?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/androi...ck-you-when-location-services-are-turned-off/

Quartz observed Android phones collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers and sending them back to Google. The details were collected even when location services were turned off on the phones, no mobile applications had been installed and there was no SIM card in the phone.

 

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...w-for-backdoors-in-any-type-of-modern-device/

German authorities are preparing a law that will force device manufacturers to include backdoors within their products that law enforcement agencies could use at their discretion for legal investigations. The law would target all modern devices, such as cars, phones, computers, IoT products, and more.

 

What consumers will get eventually is several like monopolies as there are only few large ISPs buying out everyone else... just look at what happened to Internet and search engines. Now we all collectively belong to Google and Facebook.

And no, I do not want to use Tor, I should not have to.

 

​

 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/terrif...thousands-of-innocent-turks-in-jail-1.4495021

Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to Bylock.net. Hypothetically, people could be accused of accessing the site without having knowingly viewed it.

That line redirected people to the Bylock server using several other applications, including a Spotify-like music app called Freezy and apps to look up prayer times or find the direction of Mecca. Some people have been accused because someone they shared a wifi connection with was linked to Bylock.

 

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/19/voice-recognition-technology-nsa/

It is not publicly known how many domestic communication records the NSA has collected, sampled, or retained. But the EFF’s Jamie Williams pointed out that the NSA would not necessarily have to collect recordings of Americans to make American voiceprints, since private corporations constantly record us. Their sources of audio are only growing. Cars, thermostats, fridges, lightbulbs, and even trash cans have been turning into “intelligent” (that is, internet-equipped) listening devices. The consumer research group Gartner has predicted that a third of our interactions with technology this year will take place through conversations with voice-based systems. Both Google’s and Amazon’s “smart speakers” have recently introduced speaker recognition systems that distinguish between the voices of family members. “Once the companies have it,” Williams said, “law enforcement, in theory, will be able to get it, so long as they have a valid legal process.”