New Report Debunks FBI's 'Going Dark' FUD

from the it-only-seems-dark-because-you've-been-staring-at-the-sun dept

The way things are going, pretty soon FBI Director James Comey is going to be out there alone, flipping off light switches and blowing out candles, all the while cursing the going darkness.

A new report by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society debunks law enforcement's fearful statements about encroaching darkness. (h/t New York Times) As the report points out, there may be some pockets that are darker than others, but the forward march of technology means other areas are brighter than they've ever been. In particular, the growing Internet of Things is pretty much just the Internet of Confidential Informants.

Three trends in particular facilitate government access. First, many companies’ business models rely on access to user data. Second, products are increasingly being offered as services, and architectures have become more centralized through cloud computing and data centers. A service, which entails an ongoing relationship between vendor and user, lends itself much more to monitoring and control than a product, where a technology is purchased once and then used without further vendor interaction. Finally, the Internet of Things promises a new frontier for networking objects, machines, and environments in ways that we just beginning to understand. When, say, a television has a microphone and a network connection, and is reprogrammable by its vendor, it could be used to listen in to one side of a telephone conversation taking place in its room – no matter how encrypted the telephone service itself might be. These forces are on a trajectory towards a future with more opportunities for surveillance.

On top of the additional opportunities for surveillance, there's encryption itself. The best friend of Public Enemies #1 -- whatever is far from the insurmountable obstacle Comey and others have presented it as. While some companies are offering encryption by default and others are specializing in secure communications apps and tools, this is still mostly in service to niche markets.

[C]ompanies typically wish to have unencumbered access to user data – with privacy assured through either restricting dissemination of identifiable customer information outside the boundaries of the company (and of governments, should they lawfully request the data). Implementing end-to-end encryption by default for all, or even most, user data streams would conflict with the advertising model and presumably curtail revenues.

Even Apple and Google -- the two companies that added encryption-by-default to their devices -- aren't interested in encrypting everything.

Google offers a number of features in its web-based services that require access to plaintext data, including full text search of documents and files stored in the cloud. In order for such features to work, Google must have access to the plaintext. While Apple says that it encrypts communications end-to-end in some apps it develops, the encryption does not extend to all of its services. This includes, in particular, the iCloud backup service, which conveniently enables users to recover their data from Apple servers. iCloud is enabled by default on Apple devices. Although Apple does encrypt iCloud backups, it holds the keys so that users who have lost everything are not left without recourse. So while the data may be protected from outside attackers, it is still capable of being decrypted by Apple.

In short, far more surveillance doors have been opened in the past decade than have been closed. As the authors point out, smart devices and online services have implemented voice commands, giving them the capability to record conversations far more private than those that might take place over other encrypted channels. As a case in point, the report notes the FBI exploited in-car microphones more than a decade ago, using a luxury auto "concierge" service to eavesdrop on conversations between organized crime members.

They also point out that encryption isn't always surveillance-proof. NSA officials have encouraged the use of encryption -- not just because it protects ordinary citizens from attacks, but also because it can crack some of it and grab tons of metadata no matter what form is being used. Not only that, but officials have admitted that the use of encryption "lights up" potential surveillance targets, making its haystack trawling much more efficient.

Comey is the odd man out here, abandoned by the NSA, administration and, with few exceptions, other law enforcement agencies. The solution isn't bans or backdoors. The solution is the exploitation of every new attack vector willingly created by social media apps, smart devices and the general interconnectedness of the world wide web. If he persists in this fashion, it won't be too long before he's considered no more credible than the ranting doomsayers who prowl city streets and subway platforms.

And let's not forget law enforcement agencies solved crimes and captured criminals for over two hundred years in this country -- and never found the lack of access to smartphone contents to be a hindrance.

Filed Under: encryption, exaggeration, fbi, going dark, james comey, surveillance

When Even The Wall Street Journal Calls Out The USTR's Misleading Propaganda About The TPP...

from the lies,-damned-lies-and-statistics dept

Not too surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has been a big booster of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement over the past year, repeatedly praising the deal and claiming it will save the world in all sorts of ways. Most of that is based on the faulty belief that the TPP is actually a "free trade" deal (it's actually the opposite), with some of it just being the standard WSJ faith-based belief that "if big businesses like it, it must be good."

Given that, it's a bit surprising that even the WSJ is now calling out the US Trade Rep (USTR) for its blatantly misleading propaganda about the TPP. As Glyn recently wrote about, the Peterson Institute for International Economics released a summary showing tiny economic gains from the TPP -- to the point that it makes you wonder what the fuss is. Some folks have already called into question the Peterson Institute's methodology, suggesting the results may be even worse, but even if we accept the organization's findings, the benefits to the TPP are miniscule: increasing GDP 0.5% by 2030.

But, no matter. The USTR decided to hype up this report... by tweeting out a chart so misleading that even the WSJ called it out as bogus propaganda. From the way that chart is drawn, it sure looks like a really big gap between "with TPP" and "without TPP." But, of course, it's really just the difference between $25,754 billion and $25,885 billion. Yes, $131 billion is nothing to sneeze at, but on an economic projection 15 years out, that's a rounding error. But the chart, of course, makes it look like a big deal. Here's the notoriously TPP-supporting WSJ explaining how ridiculous the chart is:

Notice anything wrong here? Look at those two values on the right side of the column. With the Trans-Pacific Partnership, U.S. real national income will be $25,885 billion in 2030. Without, it will only be $25,754 billion. That’s a difference of $131 billion. But the chart presents that gap as about the same, in size, as the gap between $18,154 billion and $25,754 billion. That’s a difference of $7.6 trillion. Yep, that’s trillion with a “t.”

The WSJ then tried to help out with its own, more accurate chart: But, of course, even that chart is somewhat misleading, since the y-axis is truncated (which the WSJ itself admits). So, to help out, we created our own chart based on Peterson's numbers (in Table 2, in case you're wondering): Notice how you basically can't see the difference between the two lines. Yeah. Compare that to the USTR's gloating above. And people wonder why we call out the USTR for being a secretive, totally dishonest organization.

Amusingly, when the WSJ reached out to the USTR, the USTR pretended that its original chart was an "error" and promised an "updated" chart:

“We noticed the error and are tweeting out updated, corrected graphics now,” said Andrew Bates, press secretary for the Office of the USTR.

So... what is the "updated, corrected graphics"? Here: So, uh, yeah, its "corrected" graphic is even more misleading in that it just hides the base altogether and makes it look like this change is some huge change. Oh, and the original graphic, which the USTR admits is an "error"? That one is still up. Because of course it is.

Filed Under: exaggeration, predictions, propaganda, tpp, ustr
Companies: peterson institute

Stanford Prison Experiment Psychologist: You're Never Going To Get Laid, You Game-Playing, Porn-Watching Fat-Asses

from the alernately,-The-Stanford-Penis-Experiment dept

Oh, good. It's time once again to hear how videogames are destroying society. This time, it's Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the controversial (putting it politely) Stanford Prison Experiment. Having driven the wheels off a much-debunked experiment, it appears Zimbardo's looking for a career renaissance of sorts, using an issue that is a bit more timely. And what could be timelier than being about the thousandth person to declare videogames the end of the world as we know it?

Speaking to the BBC, Zimbardo said his research has uncovered something in those boys who are online up to 15 hours a day.

He described boys' altered brain function like this: "When I'm in class, I'll wish I was playing World of Warcraft. When I'm with a girl, I'll wish I was watching pornography, because I'll never get rejected."

He says that such a mindset has been created because of the Web's existence and the proliferation of particular entertainment sources on it.

While Zimbardo's research would seem to be focused only on the extreme end of the human spectrum, he seems to think it applies to those who don't engage in these activities at public servant/South Korean levels of engagement.

Zimbardo defines excessive porning and video gaming as more than five hours a day.

And already the scale has shifted massively. (Also: "porning?") Now, it includes those who spend a quarter of the day engaged in some form of popular entertainment. He thinks it's killing off more than males' social drive. It's also killing their sex drive.

Kids might find online porn exciting psychologically, but physiologically they are actually becoming less excited. They suffer, he said, from PIED. Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction.

And here we are at another area of sketchy research, most often touted by those with goods and services to sell. Unsurprisingly, Zimbardo has recently published a book dealing with these very issues.

Presumably because the evidence doesn't match the assertions, Zimbardo's claims as to how many hours are too many continues to shift, all within the space of a six-minute interview.

[H[e regards the addiction and the rewiring of the brain as being a factor of not merely the number of hours, but the obvious changes in mindset…

Now it's any length of time, provided the "mindset" is "changed." Zimbardo's discussion of these males paints gamers/porn watchers as socially-stunted introverts whose hobbies are only making them more unable to deal with the outside world. And all it takes is (up to) 5 hours a day.

He does admit there's an upside to gaming/porn watching. Criminal activity is on the wane and the amount of men drinking/using illicit drugs continues to fall. But even this upside is a downside. In Zimbardo's mind, the world would be better served by an increase in drunken, drug-addled men looking to raise hell and get laid.

However, Zimbardo said: "They're not violent because they're alone in their room."

He added that young men are drinking Coke instead of alcohol and becoming "fat-asses." The chances of type-2 diabetes are increased, he said, which tends to decrease libido.

There are plenty of issues to be had with Zimbardo's skewed portrait of male gamers, starting with the "male" part. Keith Stuart's dismantling of Zimbardo's assertions at The Guardian points out that males are only barely the majority.

Research by the Internet Advertising Bureau last year found that 52% of British gamers are women. This isn’t an isolated blip and it isn’t just down to “casual” phone games like Candy Crush Saga. In the US, research specialist Super Data found that just over 50% of PC gamers are women. Senior researcher Stephanie Llamas wrote about how her data challenged the cliche that women only play casual titles – her female subjects identified mostly as “mid-core” and hardcore players.

And his take on gaming is dated and -- dare I say it -- sexist. Zimbardo sees male gamers as translucent-skinned basement dwellers whose unblinking eyes are fixed on computer monitors and TV screens. It's as if he's never heard of social gaming. The games that routinely sell the most copies in any given year are heavily-focused on multiplayer interaction. Each iteration of the Call of Duty series is fine-tuned for online play. The single-player "experience" is usually a 4-6 hour afterthought that many purchasers completely ignore. The Grand Theft Auto series has made online multiplayer an option for the past couple of releases, and even included limited local multiplayer options back in the Playstation 2 days.

As for the porn claims, the verdict's still mostly out. While there are a number of psychologists who link porn-watching to erectile dysfunction, it's tenuous at best and purely correlative at worst. With porn easily available online, the number of people partaking has undoubtedly gone up. But have erectile dysfunction cases climbed at the same rate?

It's the same logic hole that trips up arguments that violent videogames result in violent crime. While there may be some negative effects in a few members of the population, one would expect the hundreds of millions of gamers who play violent videogames to have produced an appreciable spike in violent crime -- if we're to believe violent videogames lead to violent acts. But that simply hasn't happened. Granted, numbers on reported erectile problems are far harder to come by (pun not not intended but not totally intended) than crime stats and game sales figures, but if it were approaching the apparently epidemic level of porn intake, you'd think there would be a bit more credible reporting on the link between the two.

But perhaps more troubling than the male gamer cliches and the touting of questionable correlations is Zimbardo's other ideas -- ones that don't receive quite as much play in most of the coverage. Zimbardo seems to feel porn and games (and soda, I guess) are undercutting what it means to be male and producing an inferior iteration -- at least as compared to the manlier men of the past.

[W]hile girls are increasingly succeeding in the real world, boys are retreating into cyberspace, seeking online the security and validation they can’t get anywhere else. They are bored at school, increasingly have no father figures to motivate them, don’t have the skills to form real romantic relationships, feel entitled to have things done for them (usually by their parents) and seek to avoid a looming adulthood of debt, unfulfilling work and other irksome responsibilities. As a result, they disappear into their bedrooms where, he argues, they risk becoming addicted to porn, video games and Ritalin.

Zimbardo proposes a set of "fixes" that rely heavily on turning men into men by interfacing with other men -- presumably all in a very heterosexual way. (Zimbardo's research apparently didn't cover those who don't fall under the "straight" umbrella…)

Zimbardo has lots of suggestions: more male teachers, more incentives for men to establish boys’ and men’s groups so that the former can get the masculine mentoring they otherwise lack, welfare reform to encourage fathers to remain in the family loop, crowdsourcing initiatives to fund video games that are less violent and require more co-operation, parents to talk to their sons about sex and relationships so they don’t take porn to represent real life.

The suggestions improve as the list goes on, but Zimbardo seems to fear a world of feminized, antisocial fat-asses (he refers to today's male role models as "man poodles" or "infantilized jerks") who aren't going to find the masculinity they apparently need with one hand on a controller and the other on manual override.

Then there's this:

Zimbardo contends that immersion in online technology means that boys never learn basic social communication skills, still less how to flirt, risk rejection or ask for a date. As a result, boys are hobbled by a new form of social shyness.

But wouldn't this online technology also facilitate flirting, social communication and asking for dates? Social communication is changing, but Zimbardo still wants it to resemble the sort of thing he grew up with. And this perception of unsociable losers is mostly false, but it gets perpetuated every time some axe-grinding moral panicist or book-peddling psychologist takes an inadvertent shoulder from a teenager staring a cellphone, rather than where he or she is going.

If porn/videogames were really that destructive, the world would be a complete mess. Both are ubiquitous and enjoyed by millions of people around the world, by a wide range of ages. And yet, for the most part, life is still recognizable as life, even by those who've been around since the "better days" when people talked "face to face" and waited until the newspaper arrived in the morning to discover what had happened yesterday.

Filed Under: exaggeration, internet, philip zimbardo, porn, psychology, stanford prison experiment, video games

UK Intellectual Property Office Plays Up Imaginary 'Toxic' Claim In Grabbing Food Pretending To Be From Somewhere Else

from the grab,-go-and-exaggerate dept

When it comes to regulatory enforcement, agencies are often at a loss to try and spin actions as somehow being positive. Often such seizures are seen as petty and overreaching acts focusing on business protectionism or the shutting down threats to tax revenue (permanently in some cases) by regular people, meaning that getting public support for them can be an uphill struggle. Alcohol taxes are so unpopular that it's the origin behind one of the most popular sports in the US – NASCAR. Thus it's tempting to try and upsell things by stretching claims beyond all credulity, as the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and Department of Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) departments did recently.

Facebook followers of the IPO were confronted with this story just recently: "Campaign cracks down on toxic fake alcohol" screams the headline, with the comment that thousands of liters were seized in Operation OPSON (a name that looks like it was short for "operation poison"). A serious bust of dangerous goods clearly, and clearly the agencies are doing a great job protecting the country, so share it and back to cat pictures.

Or you could actually read the article itself, and find the story isn't quite as portrayed, and no cyanide-filled bottles cosplaying as spirituous liquors were annihilated by brave officials. For that matter, not only is OPSON not a veiled reference to poison, it's not even a priority. At the head of "notes to editors," Operation OPSON is described quite differently:

"Operation OPSON, jointly run by Interpol and Europol, began in 2011 to tackle the criminal production and sale of counterfeit 'protected food name' products, such as gorgonzola or champagne. It is now an international project that regularly sees the seizure of hundreds of tonnes of fake and substandard food."

That's right, international police agencies are running an operation to seize food not because they are bad, dangerous, or harmful, but because they weren't made in an approved locale. While some are fairly evident and obvious, such as lamb or beef labelled "scotch" or "welsh," others are less-so. A Cornish pasty made in Devon or Derbyshire isn't actually a Cornish pasty, because it wasn't made in Cornwall. Likewise if you were to make Feta cheese, you can't actually call it Feta, unless the sheep/goat milk came from Greece. Even Belgium has wanted in on the act for its chocolate industry.

The food is fake (and presumed sub-standard) not because it's not that food, but because the place that made it wasn't within a certain circle on a map, even if it's absolutely identical and indistinguishable from the same product made inside that circle. This was never more evident than in 2007, when the protections around "Newcastle Brown Ale" were lifted… because the Scottish & Newcastle brewery wanted to move outside the circle.

But what of the toxic alcohol seized by the gallon? Well, like the goods themselves, it's not what it appears. The 2,421.5 liters grabbed by authorities are in their own words mostly "...for fake or fiscal infringing wines and spirits." Not because they were dangerous, but because of tax evasion, or trademark violations. So where's the "toxic" issue in the headline?

The poison comes from a raid in Derbyshire, where:

"There was little of the finished product or the raw materials (Coolex screenwash) in the unit but a large quantity of bottles, tops and boxes."

Never mind, because:

"A small amount of the finished product was identified, and on examination was found to contain high levels of iso-propanol. Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA) causes intense drunkenness, is often used in cleaning chemicals."

The question is, was that actually the finished product, or one that was put aside because it had those high levels? Moreover, it's not exactly the most toxic, as the LD50 (lethal dose) for a rat orally is 5045 mg per kilogram. Compare with, say, ethanol ("good" alcohol), at 3450 mg per kilogram of mouse. Probably why even their expert, Visiting Professor at the University of Reading, Tony Hines had to say:

"...even at low levels, a 'couple of doubles' will cause dizziness, low blood pressure, abdominal pain and nausea."

Not exactly "toxic" though, or all that different from regular booze, let's be fair. In fact, the major difference is that isopropyl alcohol is just more potent than ethanol. So, to drive home the seriousness of this, they close with the following paragraph.

"In 2012, methanol poisoning from fake vodka resulted in the deaths of 50 people in the Czech Republic. In 2014, 2 men were sentenced to life imprisonment for their part in this tragedy, and many others sentenced to 14 to 20 years for their part. Eighty survivors were blinded as a result of consuming the poison."

Not to be flippant about it (the incident has killed 51), but this was an incident that happened 30 months ago 1500 km away. It even used a different chemical (methanol), so its inclusion is completely irrelevant to the issues at hand, and is there solely to try and justify tax and trademark-based raids and seizures as being about safety, and pump up the "shareability" factor by giving them a excuse to hang "toxic" in the headline.

Now, don't get me wrong, tainted and unsafe goods are bad, there's no doubt about that. Yet if you're going to try and play up a safety angle, then you really have to have a safety problem to hang your hat on. The vodka made from screenwash might be disturbing to some, but "toxic fake alcohol" is pushing it, when even if every drop of vodka they seized (171.1 liters) that year were high in isopropyl alcohol, it's only 7% of the total seized. And yet we know they didn't grab anywhere near that amount, because more than 240 bottles of the stuff is hardly "little of the finished product," a description which would seem to me to indicate a dozen liters or less. And since they found only empties, it means it's already gone out, so they've not really "cracked down" on it either.

Overall, the only toxic thing seems to be the press release, and then only for any journalist sloppy enough to regurgitate it without bothering to read it. That's probably why, on Twitter, where pushback, feedback and replies are harder to bury, there's absolutely no mention of "toxic" at all.

That's because when it comes to poisonous, nothing beats hyperbolic government press releases for leaving good will stone dead.

Filed Under: bis, exaggeration, food, geographical indication, ipo, seizing, seizures, toxic, uk

Another Story Of A 'Fake' Brilliant Inventor? Is 'Scorpion Walter O'Brien' A Real Computer Security Genius?

from the more-of-this-crap? dept

There's apparently a new TV show on CBS called Scorpion that has received mixed-to-decent reviews. It supposedly is about some computer security geniuses/outcasts who help "solve complex, global problems." However, Annalee Newitz's description of the stupidest, most batshit insane hacker scene ever from the first episode, suggests that the show is not worth watching. In the past few years, it had been kind of nice to see Hollywood actually seem to have some clue about accurately portraying hacking in some situations, but that's all apparently been tossed out the window with Scorpion. Even if you don't read Newitz's story (or view the video clip), just know it involves an ethernet cable hanging from a flying plane with a car racing beneath it to download some backup software needed by the airport so planes can land. Yeah.

A big part of the show's marketing is the claim that the story is partially based on the life of one of the show's executive producers, Walter O'Brien. CBS News has an article talking up these claims of O'Brien's amazing feats, helping out its parent company, CBS, who broadcasts the show. But... for such a "genius," many of O'Brien's claims are coming under scrutiny, and they're not holding up well. Having just gone through the whole Shiva Ayyadurai / inventor of email crap, it's beginning to sound like a similar case of someone pumping up their own past for publicity purposes.

The claims about O'Brien are both odd and oddly specific. Here's CBS's reporting:

Walter O’Brien has the fourth highest IQ in the world.

Elsewhere, he claims that he was "diagnosed as a child prodigy with an IQ of 197." First off, there are significant questions about IQ as a particularly useful measurement of anything. Furthermore, the idea that there's some definitive list of those with the highest IQs seems equally questionable. A quick Google search will show you a whole bunch of "top 10 lists" of IQs -- all of them different, and none of them including anyone named Walter O'Brien.

O'Brien's story started unraveling when he made the somewhat unwise decision to do a Reddit AMA. Redditors are pretty good at sniffing out completely bogus claims, and it didn't take them long here. Also, Asher Langton has been doing a bang up job debunking basically every claim that O'Brien makes.

Among other things, O'Brien's story claims that he began Scorpion Computer Services in the mid-1980s and that "Scorpion has mitigated risk for 7 years on $1.9 trillion of investments and has invented and applied Artificial Intelligence engines to protect United States war fighters in Afghanistan." It's not even entirely clear what that means. It goes on:

Since 1988, Scorpion's team of world class experts partner with clients on a global basis, across industries, to add real measurable value in mission-critical initiatives from planning, to execution, to running the business. Scorpion's senior management has a collective knowledge of more than 413 technologies, 210 years in IT, and 1,360 projects. Scorpion himself has created over 177 unique technology inventions including ScenGen and WinLocX and is one of the world's leading experts in the application of computer science and artificial intelligence to solve complex industry challenges."

Again with the odd, and oddly specific claims. They have knowledge of 413 technologies? Do they have a list somewhere? Does it include the coffee machine in the lunch room? Did they send someone out to get the new iPhone 6 to make it 414? Either way, there are... just a few problems with these claims. As Langton points out, the "headquarters" of Scorpion Computer Services Inc. does not appear to be a particularly large or impressive company. Its headquarters is actually... a UPS store address That report notes that it has one employee, and revenue of $66k. It's possible that the report is inaccurate, but for such a big and successful company, you'd expect to see... at least a bit more historical evidence of its existence. But there is none.

And then there's this page (and here's the web archive version in case O'Brien figures out how to delete the old page), which apparently used to be the site for Walter's Scorpion computer Services, that, um, looks like it was built on GeoCities -- complete with the animated fire torches next to the dreadfully designed logo.

For a big, massively successful company... you'd expect, um, something a bit more professional. Walter's own Linkedin profile notes that he actually worked at Capital Group for a while, with redditors claiming he was just a QA guy there, though his profile says he was a "technology executive." Many other claims on the company's website read like self-promotional gibberish. "We saved $43 billion in opportunity risks over a five-year period." "We invented an efficiency engine that performs 250 human years of work every 1.5 hrs with over 99% improvement over human error." By the way, the "see how" link on that last one doesn't actually show you "how" it just takes you to a page about how the company is a value added reseller "for proven IT products." The entire website looks like gibberish from someone trying to sound like a real tech company. It reminds me of Jukt Micronics.

Langton also turned up that O'Brien appears to have another "company" called Strike Force, using the same UPS Store address, and with very, very, very, very similar website design and bullshittery. That site has a really bizarre "what others say" page, listing out random referrals for O'Brien, which are generally just the standard empty "personal reference letters" people without much experience tend to ask some former colleagues for when looking for a new job. The first one is from Steven Messino (with the date conveniently stripped off) which looks like the generic job reference letter:

Note that O'Brien claims that Messino is the co-founder of Sun. That's... not true. Anyone who knows anything about the history of Sun knows it was co-founded by Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla in 1982. Messino's own LinkedIn page shows he joined Sun in 1988. Six years after it was founded. Also, Sun had its IPO in 1986. So it's not like this was a small company when Messino joined... as a "regional sales manager."

Basically, everywhere you look, O'Brien's claims are either massively exaggerated to downright ridiculous.

There are also some odd personal claims about "Homeland Security" coming to find him as a 13-year old boy for hacking into NASA. Except, when he was 13, there was no Homeland Security -- an agency established after the September 11, 2001 attacks. O'Brien also claims this:

Scorpion was born and raised in Ireland, and at 16, ranked first in national high speed computer problem solving competitions. At 18, he competed in the World Olympics in Informatics and has ranked as high as the sixth fastest programmer in the world.

Sixth fastest programmer in the world? Really? Some folks on Reddit noted that it doesn't appear Ireland competed in the "International Olympiad in Informatics" in 1993, though someone else found a report from the University of Sussex, which O'Brien attended, noting that O'Brien had come in 6th in a different contest, but in the Olympiad itself, he came in 90th. I mean that's great for an 18 year old, but it hardly makes him into some programming genius.

And we won't even touch the claims that his programming helped catch the Boston Marathon bombers, because... well... really?

Frankly, the parallels with Ayyadurai and the email story are there. It certainly appears that, like Ayyadurai, O'Brien was a bright kid who did some impressive programming as a teenager, but then didn't appear to amount to all that much noteworthy beyond that. Try searching for any news references or evidence of O'Brien doing anything other than in the last few months in the publicity leading up to this new TV show. However, he is trying to reinvent himself and rewrite his history as some sort of genius programmer responsible for all sorts of amazing things, very little of which seems directly supportable. Of course, CBS doesn't really care, so long as they have a fun TV show that people watch, but at the very least, they shouldn't continue to spread the exaggerated myths about O'Brien that appear to have little basis in fact.

Filed Under: cybersecurity, exaggeration, hacking, hollywood, scorpion, shiva ayyadurai, walter o'brien

The Real Blame For The 'Slender Man' Killings Is The Media Blaming Slender Man For The Killings

from the media-hype dept

Since we originally predicted and then witnessed major media outlets losing their minds over the horrific attempted murder committed by two young girls in Wisconsin, you may have heard that there has been a second attempted killing by another young girl that's also being billed as a "Slender Man killing." In this latest case, a young girl wore a white mask and attempted to stab her mother. She too is supposedly involved in the Creepypasta community and was interested in the Slender Man story. Media outlets, that really ought to know better, have since been knocking each other over in an attempt to shine the largest spotlight on an internet community that enjoys telling each other ghost stories in an attempt to assign blame for the horrors on which they report. It turns out that, should they delve a little deeper to understand what the Slender Man community is all about, perhaps they should be turning that spotlight on themselves instead.

Fruzsina Eordogh, who appears to be well informed about how the Creepypasta community and the Slender Man myth operates, outlines the folly that is mass media reporting on the two attacks. He claims there have been two glaring omissions in the reporting, the first of which is an absolute refusal to include the attention multipliers of online myth disseminators like Pew Die Pie. Pew Die Pie is something of a YouTube celebrity and his work includes Slender Man videos.

The little girls first tried to stab their friend in a public restroom, then in the woods. Both scenes, of Slender Man catching up with you in a public restroom and in the woods, happen in the first episode of Pew Die Pie's Slender Man video series. Is Pew Die Pie responsible for the stabbings? No, of course not.

In the case of the 13-year-old girl, her mother mentioned her daughter plays Minecraft, and the ultimate bad guy in the game is Enderman, a creepy figure the creator of Minecraft admitted to being inspired by Slender Man. Is Minecraft responsible for the stabbings? Again, no, of course not, but yet again every outlet has failed to mention the Slender Man-inspired monster in Minecraft.

Understanding the point of the above is key: nobody is blaming Pew Die Pie, Minecraft, or anyone else using the myth to tell stories for the killings. The sole point being made is that you have to understand the way the Slender Man community works: it is built off of gaining recognition in wider audiences. That's the whole point of the community, to expand upon the myth by creating doctored pictures, telling wilder stories, and getting Slender Man out there as widely as possible. The whole myth started with fictional photographs and news reports. That's the point. And guess how you take that to the next level?

Think of Slender Man as a community art project, where for years now adults, teens and tweens have been fabricating fake news articles, photographs, and even video games and comics, about Slender Man, this all-powerful, all-knowing spectre-monster with long arms (shaped like claws, or tree branches, or tentacles depending on the artist) that mind controls and kills people. When these two Wisconsin girls say they wanted to honor the Slender Man myth, to make him "real" and prove the "skeptics wrong," it sounds more like they wanted to participate in the community by creating the most credible news article about Slender Man ever. They didn't want to make him real by doing another photoshop, that's already been done. So how do you make the most credible news article about Slender Man? You actually go out and make Slender Man happen in a way the news can cover.

And, because these kids have a basic understanding of the world in which they live, they likely damn well knew the mass media would gobble this up like pigs at a trough. The girls in Wisconsin did more to propel the Slender Man myth into the public consciousness than anyone had before and the news outlets were their tools and unwitting conspirators. By the time the ink was dry on the Wisconsin story, a young girl in Ohio would have all the confirmation required on how to keep the news multiplier going in favor of Slender Man. Slender Man has jumped out of the fictional realm now, like the Poltergeist leaping from a television, and the news is the highway it took to get there.

Any media outlet that reports on this story and fails to mention that they as an outlet are now contributing to the Slender Man myth, is laughably ignorant and dangerous. The press does not exist in a vacuum. The press cannot blame CreepyPasta and memes but not blame itself or Pew Die Pie. In fact, the primary driver of the Slender Man myth is no longer Pew Die Pie, Minecraft, CreepyPasta, reddit, 4chan or Something Awful, but the press itself.

At some point all the people of our world are going to have to sit down and have a long conversation about how our news media operates to glorify some of the horrors we face. Murderers, school shooters, and terrorists all rely on the clockwork-like commitment of mass media to turn them into what they most want to be: a spectacle. We don't have to play along, but we do. That part's on us. But it's also on a media culture that prefers to keep the important role that they play out of the story.

Filed Under: culture, exaggeration, hype, media, myth, slender man, slenderman

Editorial Claims Houston Prosecutors Are Pushing Through Nearly 1,000 Sex Trafficking Indictments Every Day

from the do-you-even-math dept

Editorials written in support of legislation are prone to conjuring up hysterical situations/numbers in order to drive the point home. You can't motivate the average reader if there's no hook. But the editorial writer should at least make sure the numbers being used don't immediately prompt incredulous laughter from any reader with a couple of functioning brain cells.

The editorial board for the Dallas Morning News recently issued a regrettable opinion piece supporting the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, which was introduced last week. In the writer's hurry to portray human trafficking as a terrible blight on humanity, credibility went right out the window.

Two Texas Republicans, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe of the Houston area, are co-sponsoring a bill that would impose stiff penalties on these adult victimizers of up to life in prison. The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, which has bipartisan support in both houses, would supplement an existing law that focuses primarily on punishing sex-trafficking organizations abroad.

Poe and Cornyn estimate that one-quarter of U.S. sex-trafficking victims have Texas roots. Poe says our state's proximity to Mexico and high immigrant population give the state a particularly high profile. In Houston alone, about 300,000 sex trafficking cases are prosecuted each year. Tighter border controls and reduced profit margins from the drug trade are pushing organized crime groups to turn increasingly to sex trafficking, law enforcers say.

That ridiculous figure, which posits that Houston prosecutes nearly 900 sex traffickers a day (if working 365 days a year), has since been removed by the editorial squad at Dallas Morning News. The update line notes that "inaccurate numbers" had been used and have since been deleted. (The original version can be found here towards the middle of the page.)

This amazing claim was completely debunked by Houston criminal defense attorney Mark Bennett, who broke down actual prosecution stats and the possible rationale behind the Dallas News' decision to run with the 300,000/year claim.

Nobody seems to know where that 300,000 num­ber comes from. (Mag­gie McNeill sug­gests a plau­si­ble gen­e­sis here and here.) It’s a cou­ple of orders of mag­ni­tude less obvi­ously wrong than the same num­ber attrib­uted to Hous­ton, but still glar­ingly obvi­ously wrong—if the wrong­ness of “300,000 sex-trafficking cases in Hous­ton” were equiv­a­lent to get­ting smacked upside the head with a 2X4, “300,000 sex-trafficking cases in the United States” would be get­ting poked in the arm with a fork.

That's the hype. Here are the numbers.

In Har­ris County, accord­ing to Texas Office of Court Admin­is­tra­tion sta­tis­tics, 36,862 new felony cases were filed and 68,142 new mis­de­meanor cases were filed in 2012. So the total of all new cases filed in Har­ris County is nowhere near the 300,000 sex traf­fick­ing cases asserted by the Dallas Morn­ing News.

Bennett speculates the DMN may have just misquoted Rep. Ted Poe, one of the sponsors of the bill.

Poe, a Repub­li­can from Hum­ble, said sex traf­fick­ing rings prey on the large num­ber of immi­grant women and girls liv­ing in the Hous­ton area and across Texas, account­ing for a dis­pro­por­tion­ate share of the esti­mated 300,000 sex traf­fick­ing cases pros­e­cuted each year.

As Bennett points out, there aren't even 300,000 federal prosecutions nationwide per year. 2010's report shows only 91,047 people being prosecuted in federal courts, so even Poe's nationwide claim is demonstrably false. Even more damning are these numbers.

Federally funded human trafficking task forces opened 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking for investigation between January 2008 and June 2010.

Now, it's bad enough that one of the bill's sponsors would throw out an unresearched "statistic" like this while pushing legislation. But that's somewhat expected from our politicians, especially when they've got a horse in the race. But it's even worse when a journalistic entity not only takes this stat at face value, but makes it comically worse by severely reducing its scope from national to local.

Mistakes will be made occasionally. I understand that. But this one should never have made it past the first round of editing. Certainly Rep. Poe is partially to blame for this, but the paper's editorial team should know that presenting patently untrue claims as fact severely weakens its stance on the issue. Of course, coming out in favor of punishing sex traffickers is hardly a controversial stance, so it's likely the editorial didn't receive a thorough vetting before publication.

But letting this slip through compromises the paper's credibility and accepting Rep. Poe's "statistics" as fact indicates DMN is in possession of a faulty BS-detector, something no serious journalistic entity should ever let fall into disrepair.

Filed Under: congress, dallas morning news, exaggeration, laws, sex trafficking, ted poe

UK Gov't Losing The Plot: Now Claiming Snowden Leaks Could Help Pedophiles

from the wtf? dept

Having already gone down the crazy path to arguing that journalism can be terorrism if it's "designed to influence a government," in the David Miranda detention lawsuit, the UK government is also claiming that the Ed Snowden leaks may help pedophiles. This seems to be a dystopian updated version of copyright maximalists trying to use child porn to support their own arguments. The general thinking is "just make some sort of nonsensical connection to child porn, and that'll show people how serious this is." The reality is that since most people can think, they realize that there is no connection to child porn, and thus the claim makes no sense. Same thing here, but at an even more bizarre level of insanity.

Paedophiles may escape detection because highly-classified material about Britain’s surveillance capabilities have been published by the Guardian newspaper, the government has claimed.

A senior Whitehall official said data stolen by Edward Snowden, a former contractor to the US National Security Agency, could be exploited by child abusers and other cyber criminals.

How? Uh, don't ask silly questions like that. The government has said "child abusers" so shut up and be scared. The Telegraph article, by David Barrett, admits that the government didn't explain how it made this connection, but then attempts to connect the dots for you:

it is well known that many paedophiles use the internet to share child pornography and to groom potential victims. They also use “peer to peer” groups on the web to communicate with other child abusers.

Any clues about how to evade detection which have been provided by Mr Snowden’s leaks could help paedophiles to cover their tracks.

But, under that argument, any privacy or encryption could be lumped into that same camp. Does David Barrett or the UK government refuse to use SSL on webpages, since encryption can be used to cover the tracks of pedophiles? The argument shows just how painfully desperate the UK government is in this case -- and also how petty and jealous it appears the Guardian's UK competitors have become, in that this is reported as if Snowden's efforts seriously would "help pedophiles."

Filed Under: ed snowden, exaggeration, leaks, pedophiles, propaganda, surveillance, uk

The Exaggeration Of The Cyberbullying Problem Is Harming Anti-Bullying Efforts

from the suffering-from-threat-inflation dept

Cyberbullying continues to be the topic du jour, especially for school administrators and legislators, both of which feel something needs to be done, even if they both have nothing in the form of hard data showing the threat matches the perception.

The result is bad policies and worse laws aimed at fighting an exaggerated problem. How exaggerated is it? Well, that depends on who you ask. As Larry Magid at HuffPo points out, the numbers tend to rise if there's a product or service in play.

I got a call recently from a woman who works for a company that makes an app designed to "keep kids safe" by enabling parents to monitor their texts and social media activities. The pitch included some dire statistics such as "70 percent of kids are cyberbullied" and -- like other companies that make parental-control software -- I was also told that it helps protect kids from strangers who would do them harm.

Actual studies point to much lower numbers, although there's no solid consensus.

The National Center for Educational Statistics reports that 6 percent of students in grades 6-12 experienced cyberbullying. The Centers for Disease Control found in 2011 that 16.2 percent of students had been bullied via email, chat rooms, instant messaging, websites or texting -- compared to 20.1 percent who had been bullied on school property (traditional bullying) -- during the 12 months prior to the survey. The Cyberbullying Research Center reports that "on average, about 24 percent of the students who have been a part of our last six studies have said they have been the victim of cyberbullying at some point in their lifetime."

Dan Olweus, who the editor of the European Journal of Development Psychology referred to as the "father of bullying research" wrote a 2012 article for that journal where he said that "claims about cyberbullying made in the media and elsewhere are greatly exaggerated and have little empirical scientific support." Based on a three-year survey of more than 440,000 U.S. children (between 3rd and 12th grade), 4.5 percent of kids had been cyberbullied compared to 17.6 percent from that same sample who had experienced traditional bullying. An even more interesting statistic from that study is that only 2.8 percent of kids had bullied others.

Because cyberbullying isn't precisely defined, variations are to be expected. But even the most expansive definitions fail to return the scary numbers quoted by those pushing software, policies and legislation.

i-Safe, "the leader in Internet safety education," compiled these cyberbullying numbers back in 2004 (and hasn't updated them in nearly a decade).

42% of kids have been bullied while online. 1 in 4 have had it happen more than once.
35% of kids have been threatened online. Nearly 1 in 5 have had it happen more than once.
21% of kids have received mean or threatening e-mail or other messages.
58% of kids admit someone has said mean or hurtful things to them online. More than 4 out of 10 say it has happened more than once.
53% of kids admit having said something mean or hurtful to another person online. More than 1 in 3 have done it more than once.
58% have not told their parents or an adult about something mean or hurtful that happened to them online.

The most surprising thing about these numbers is that the "mean or hurtful" stat isn't closer to 100%. Kids, due to their inherent lack of a developed world view, say "mean or hurtful" things all the time. Trying to portray this as "evidence" of widespread bullying is disingenuous. i-Safe may be a non-profit, but it still sells subscriptions to instructional software through its website. i-Safe has a vested interest in portraying bullying as worse than it actually is.

safetyNETkids, which also sells videos and curriculum, has this stat (among others) on its website:

Around half of teens have been the victims of cyber bullying

This startling "fact" is quoted all over the internet and is supposedly pulled from a Hartford County Examiner article. Unfortunately, that stat shows up nowhere in the referenced article and the study itself was performed not by the Examiner, but by the National Crime Prevention Council, home of McGruff the Crime Dog. The actual "stat" quoted by the Examiner says simply, "over 40% of all teenagers with Internet access have reported being bullied online." At some point, someone decided "over 40%" meant "around half," which sounds much more epidemic.

The actual number contained in the NCPC's report is 43%, closer to 40% than "almost half." How did this study manage to come up with a higher percentage than the others Magid quotes? By applying some very loose definitions, much like i-Safe above.

Most commonly, bullying is thought of as a pervasive, consistent activity, not a one-time event. Dan Olweus, "father of bullying research," defines bullying as "aggressive behavior that is intentional and that invoices an imbalance of power. Most often, it is repeated over time." Recent studies like those performed by the NCPC and deployed by i-Safe have upped the number of incidents by weakening the term. While someone might feel "bullied" by a one-off interaction, defining every singular experience as "bullying" dilutes the meaning, leading to the punishment of non-bullies and diverting resources from dealing with real problems.

There are a lot of reasons why exaggerating is bad. For one thing, it causes parents to worry unnecessarily. Of course parents are concerned about their kids use of online technology but focusing on the technology -- instead of the child's social emotional state -- is likely to divert their attention from real issues. And, as Olweus pointed out in this paper, "It may also create feelings of powerlessness and helplessness in the face of the presumably 'huge' and ubiquitous cyberbullying problem.. [and] that fixating on cyberbullying could encourage "an unfortunate shift in the focus of anti-bullying work if digital bullying is seen as the key bullying problem in the schools."

Some research exists indicating that the expansion of anti-bullying policies is making things worse.

University of Texas at Arlington criminologist Seokjin Jeong analyzed data collected from 7,000 students from all 50 states.

He thought the results would be predictable and would show that anti-bullying programs curb bullying. Instead — he found the opposite.

Jeong said it was, “A very disappointing and a very surprising thing. Our anti-bullying programs, either intervention or prevention does not work.”

The study concluded that students at schools with anti-bullying programs might actually be more likely to become a victim of bullying. It also found that students at schools with no bullying programs were less likely to become victims.

The results were stunning for Jeong. “Usually people expect an anti-bullying program to have some impact — some positive impact.”

i-Safe says 42% have been bullied online, but only 25% have had it happen "more than once." 58% have had something "mean or hurtful" said to them, but only 40% have seen repeat occurrences. There's a huge gap between these single events and pervasive behavior and that gap is being exploited.

The detailed methodology from the Harris Poll powering the NCPC's bullying numbers is no longer posted at its site, but the four-page summary uses the following to define "bullying."

- Someone pretending to be someone else in order to trick them online, getting them to reveal personal information.
- Someone lying about someone online.
- Pretending to be them while communicating with someone else.
- Posting unflattering pictures of them online, without permission.

Between the weak definitions and the inclusion of one-time events, NCPC has watered down "bullying" to define actions that, while temporarily unpleasant and/or embarrassing, are hardly evidence of "aggressive behavior repeated over time."

This isn't to say that cyberbullying doesn't exist and isn't a problem. This is simply to point out that the more worrisome the numbers presented, the more likely there's a narrative or product being pushed that benefits those doing the pushing. The downside, as noted by Olweus above, is that real problems are being ignored while legislators and school administrators chase down incidents common to any group of people interacting with each other, especially children and teens.

Filed Under: cyberbullying, exaggeration

Even The AP Is Calling Bull On Government Claims Of PRISM Helping Stop NYC Subway Bomb

from the when-you-can't-even-convince-them... dept

We've already explained how some NSA supporters, including Rep. Mike Rogers and Senator Dianne Feinstein, are trying to defend PRISM and other NSA surveillance efforts by saying that it stopped a NYC subway bombing but their claims don't seem to hold up under scrutiny. Now even the Associated Press is calling out those statements as highly questionable, which is somewhat amazing for the AP, as it normally loves to just present "both sides of the story" and then let you decide what's real. But the article linked above actually digs in and points out where the claims by the NSA's defenders don't seem to add up to anything.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said investigators "found backpacks with bombs." Really, the bombs hadn't been completed and the backpacks the FBI found were unrelated to the plot.

Feinstein said the FBI had Zazi under surveillance for six months. Court testimony showed Zazi was watched only for about two weeks before he was arrested.

But there's a much bigger point that the AP makes. Even if the claim was somehow true that PRISM was useful, nowhere does that claim show how a standard warrant wouldn't have provided the same information:

That's because, even before the surveillance laws of 2007 and 2008, the FBI had the authority to - and did, regularly - monitor email accounts linked to terrorists. The only difference was, before the laws changed, the government needed a warrant.

To get a warrant, the law requires that the government show that the target is a suspected member of a terrorist group or foreign government, something that had been well established at that point in the Zazi case.

In other words, even if PRISM was used, there's no evidence that it was needed, because the NSA could have easily obtained the same information through traditional means -- getting a warrant -- and without potentially violating the privacy of millions of others.

Filed Under: dianne feinstein, exaggeration, james clapper, mike rogers, nsa, nsa surveillance, nyc subway bomb, prism, warrants, zazi