Eyes in the Sky

Feature for Dazed and Confused

As you read this, the odds are that at least a few of you are having your online behaviour monitored by a group of DC Comics-style vigilantes known as Project Vigilant, a creepy network of hackers and “volunteer analysts” who use extra-legal techniques to snitch on people whose online activities pose a threat to Western governments.

The most high-profile Project Vigilant scalping was of Bradley E Manning, an American soldier who leaked classified documents about military catastrophes in Iraq to whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. He is now facing a 52-year jail stretch thanks to these real-life Watchmen, who are spying on at least 250 millions citizens worldwide on behalf of law enforcement agencies.

These self-appointed cyber-spies aren’t the only people willing and able to monitor your every move. There are also a number of legitimate companies with government contracts who can – or will soon be able to – pick out potentially damaging behaviour such as terrorist attacks and protests before they even happen. Cyveillance and Recorded Future are companies which both offer “predictive analysis” software to other companies and governments – including the CIA and major record labels – which enables them to detect potential security threats by building online profiles of their suspects. They comb through millions of blogs, Twitter accounts and other open sources of information in search of patterns of behaviour that appear suspicious or unusual. By keeping track of everything in the present, and plotting the connections between these events on millions of virtual graphs and applying the data to complex algorithms, they claim to be able to plot what’s going to happen in the future.

Recorded Future has revealed how thoroughly it can monitor anybody’s online momentum through “Life Analysis”. Its log of Islamic militant Omar Hammami starts 12 years before his birth, with his parents moving to the US from Syria in 1972. Then it says: “Recorded Future harvested online content that highlights early influences of religion in Hammami’s life through his father (Islam) as well as with his mother (Christianity). We also begin to see mention of his prayer in school and a vocalised aversion to violence in his earlier years: Between 2000 and 2002, we see an uptick in momentum on Hammami as he reportedly defended the cause of Osama bin Laden during a classroom discussion during his junior year of high school (2000). Soon after, Hammami enrolled in the University of Alabama where he became the president of the University of Alabama’s Muslim Student Association.” It continues: “It is after his final move to Somalia that we identify his first connection to the terrorist organisation al Shabaab in 2006. Hammami’s earliest affiliation with the group is discovered by querying the event ‘Person Career’ and the entity ‘Omar Hammami’.”

Tony Dyhouse, cyber security director of digital systems at QinetiQ, a UK sister company to Cyveillance, says this technology is great for the muscle men of industry and government. “A lot of threats faced by organisations that use the internet are to do with what people say about them,” he explains. “Their brand is very valuable. A tarnished or damaged brand can be a very expensive thing, so it’s very important to know what people are saying about your company."

Then you have the open source intelligence. In this day and age there are lots of people being made redundant in the economic downturn, so people can attempt to get back at their company. Dissatisfied ex-staff members can be a potential threat to a company, so it’s important that they can see if anybody is organising any protest or attack against the company using the web, which does happen. Sometimes people will discuss the organisation of a protest online. In the UK we had the fuel protests where people were blocking fuel stations. They were organising that online. So to be able to monitor that organisation – it wasn’t done covertly, it was simply done on the internet…

Cyveillance does have the capability to monitor open-source areas of the internet for people discussing things, so by using very good search criteria, it is possible to provide protection for an organisation by finding out what people are talking about.” Ministry of Defence futurists are also currently testing “eyes in the sky” – Hydravision sensors which can be attached to any object, gather vast amounts of information about an area, and can “identify people in unusual poses, such as holding a weapon.”

During recent trials, these sensors gathered the equivalent of 40,000 Encyclopedia Britannicas’ worth of data in just two weeks. With this new technology – a mixture of software and hardware attached to things like lamp posts and helicopters – it claims to be able to pounce on suspicious behaviour before it actually happens. “Think of it as the ultimate CCTV system,” says MOD’s chief technologist for sensors and countermeasures, Andrew Seedhouse. “An incident occurs, perhaps a bomb goes off, and we can use this host of data to back track over time. Who was near the scene and where were they before the incident? What buildings or vehicles can we now associate with the incident? Could we now link people, vehicles, events, buildings and locations to the collection of equipment or the buying of materials? All the sensor data can form a complete picture. Looking to the future, this research will help us to look for anomalies both in behaviour and environment, and work towards surveillance alerts to appropriate forces before an incident occurs.”

A similar programme in the US, Combat Zones That See (CTS), has been in development since 2003, and is able to map precise movements in entire cities and combat zones – from a man itching his lip to a truck veering off course. Seeing as the US and UK share the vast majority of defence and security information, this will be significantly advanced with Hydravision capabilities. US military spokesmen have said that CTS will be used in combat zones rather than on the home front, but that neglects the fact that, since the 2001 Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, cities like London and New York have become the number one combat zones for terrorists.

Hydravision’s developers make clear that their products could be used just as easily to do regular police work as prevent terrorist attacks – so, while holding a weapon is one “unusual pose” which could be picked up, it will also be possible to detect miscreants who flout the law by pissing in doorways, organising protests, or sparking up a spliff.

The real danger of future-mapping technology, however, is of innocent people being singled out with “false positives”, according to surveillance expert and author Richard Aldrich: “People who have done a series of random things but when a machine looks at it, it says that person has done something bad…” those are the ones at risk, he says. “Once you go over to data mining, you are essentially handing the process over to robots, who roam through this material looking for patterns of suspicious activity.” With millions of people being treated as potential suspects, and groups of web vigilantes on the prowl for would-be wrongdoers, the day may come when it will be about proving your innocence from what you were planning to do, than what you’re meant to have done. And remember, even if you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean web vigilantes aren’t tracking you right now.