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9 November 2006

Mobile Phone Service Providers and Customer Location Information

I recently finished serving as an expert witness in a court case in which I had to provide my opinion about the possible locations of a mobile phone given cellular tower IDs and base station positions. While this information had to be subpoenaed from Verizon as part of the litigation, it may be disconcerting for some to acknowledge that in databases distributed throughout the world, mobile phone service providers are storing records of location and social network data for one out of three people on Earth.

Besides the data’s obvious utility in courtroom trial cases like the one I was testifying in, I’m curious about the long-term consequences of commercial companies recording a time series of locations and communication events for billions of people. Who legally owns this data? Because carriers like T-Mobile & Sprint now publicly disclose the locations of their towers, base station locations are no longer the corporate secret they once were, and subsequently can’t be used to prevent customers from obtaining the location information collected about them. If I ask my T-Mobile representative to provide me with my call log history, they don’t seem to have a problem with disclosing my communication events to me. However, when asked to provide me with an approximation of the locations associated with each of my calls, they still claim this is prohibited. So, empirically at least, it doesn’t appear that the customers own the location data collected about them. And if the customers don’t own this information, then I imagine by default, the mobile operators are the ones who own the records of movement data for all of their customers.

What guidelines do mobile operators have to abide by when using this data? Can it be sold to a 3rd party? How much would a detailed time-series of my locations over the last five years go for on Ebay? Who would be the highest bidder? Urban planning consultants interested in public transportation usage? Companies working on developing the next census? Wall St traders interested in where I’m doing my grocery shopping?

This data clearly has value. Already carriers are selling real-time location information to companies who use this information to extrapolate the location and speed of the individual and use this data to offer road traffic updates and forecasts. As the major carriers’ billion dollar networks turn into a commodity infrastructure, mobile operators are going to be ever more interested in monetizing the location data generated from their customers. (“This speeding ticket has been brought to you courtesy of Cingular Wireless. Raising the bar.”)

So here is an exercise for the interested reader – call up your own service provider and ask for the location information associated with your call logs. Let me know if you’ve had any luck.

Posted by Nathan Eagle at 3:18 AM | Comments (3)

6 November 2006

Coming home on election day? Republicans, Democrats, and their partisan networks

There are some surveys suggesting a shift toward Republicans in the waning hours of the Congressional campaign. While one has to be careful about interpreting shifts, which are often stated in terms of a gap between the parties or candidates, because the gap is subject to twice the sampling error reported in a survey, i.e., +/- 4 becomes +/- 8, resulting in illusory swings, there is some scholarly basis for believing that Republicans would “come home.” In particular, following from work by Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague and collaborators, discussions about politics likely are most active very close to the election. These discussions essentially activate the influence of ones milieu. Because partisans tend to have confidants who are like themselves, this tends to mean that wavering partisans will return to their partisan ways come election day. In this case, my understanding is that Republicans were wavering more than Democrats, and as a result a return to the fold would naturally create some shift to Republicans. Keys to watch, then, are (1) how independents vote (my understanding is that they are tilting heavily toward Democrats); (2) relative turnout of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents; and (3) the geography of these shifts—e.g., with respect to the House, a shift toward Republicans would not matter much in the South (except for a couple of seats), but a shift in the Northeast and Midwest would matter a lot. Regarding the first point, independents do tend to turn out at lower rates than partisans. Diana Mutz has done some fascinating work on the immobilizing effects of being exposed to cross-cutting pressures. An interesting question is whether, if Independents are tilting heavily toward the Democrats, they will be exposed to fewer cross-cutting pressures (as compared to if they were splitting down the middle), and thus likely turn out at higher than expected rates.

In a matter of hours, we should know...

Posted by David Lazer at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)

3 November 2006

The dark side to knowledge sharing: U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer

In an earlier entry I had blogged about an effort at "open source intelligence"-- a large archive of Iraqi documents that the US government placed on the web in the hope that the same type of open source dynamics underlying wikipedia, linux, etc, would fuel insights that the more old-fashioned, hierarchical US intelligence community could not match. The subtext was a hope by some on the Hill that evidence of imminent Iraqi nuclear capacity would be uncovered.

Well, chalk one up for clunky hierarchiy, because it turns out that hierarchical controls on information are sometimes more important than creative processing of that information.

A story in the NYT today (see excerpts below) discusses how that archive included sensitive information about how to build nuclear weapons that would shortcut the development process for other aspiring nuclear powers. In short, while the US was looking at the archive as an open source community for intelligence, Iran and others might look at it as an open source community on bulding nuclear weapons.

There is a much broader issue here about open source processes (which I am defining pretty broadly here), when they are desirable, when they are not. Essentially: in an adversarial system there is a need to prevent the adversary from participating in the knowledge sharing process. This, at times, can be hard or impossible to do. Another recent instantiation of this is the recent military effort to shut down "milblogs"-- blogs by soliders.

The tough tradeoff is that there are sometimes clear benefits to open source processes in terms of knowledge creation, but that that value creation process can destroy value if that knowledge falls in the wrong hands.

EXCERPTS

U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr. Schulte about the Web site.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

...

The Web site, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,” was a constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of documents included everything from a collection of religious and nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein’s intelligence service. It became a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur historians.

...

In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as potentially dangerous. “It’s a cookbook,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency’s rules. “If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.”

...

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic issues said the documents showed “where the Iraqis failed and how to get around the failures.” The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states.

Posted by David Lazer at 7:12 AM | Comments (1)