Good Reads: No cyber-utopia for activists

The “Tag Challenge” sponsored by the US State Department had five people who agreed to serve as “suspects” and to be in public during the day of March 31 in Washington DC, New York, London, Bratislava, and Stockholm.  Their pictures were posted on the Internet, with no other identifying information. The challenge? To find them and take a picture of them that day. The individual or team with the most pictures would win a $5,000 prize.

A team from MIT called “Crowdscanner” won the prize with three of the suspects snapped. They did it by recruiting agents for cash on Twitter and other social media sites. They offered $1 for recruiting a new member of the team (up to 2,000 members), $500 for sending in a picture of one of the suspects, and $100 to anyone who recruited someone who captured a picture (leaving them on the hook, in the worst case, for $5,000 – the same amount as the offered prize).  They won by tracking down three of the suspects in 12 hours.

Mr. Bechler points out that these efforts are being driven to develop new intelligence and military tools, and that social and computer scientists are increasingly getting in on the act. “I’m writing an article on how this kind of research is integral to contemporary US military operations. And, it should come as no surprise that the computer scientists who are winning these prizes are consultants either for the US military, or are members of scientific advisory boards which contract through the military. “

Finally, new forms of technology are making life difficult for some agents of the state.

At Wired magazine’s Danger Room, Jeff Stein writes on how the expanding use of eye scanners and biometric passports are cramping spies’ style – a boomerang for surveillance advocates.

“The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities,” he writes, and goes on quote a former field operative. “’If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you can’t go again under another name,’” explains a career spook, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he remains an agency consultant. ”So it’s a one-time thing — one and done. The biometric data on your passport, and maybe your iris, too, has been linked forever to whatever name was on your passport the first time.”

Follow Dan Murphy on Twitter.

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