Information is leverage. Information is power. Information is Maltego.

These are the catch-phrases for a South African company that recently released an affordable, user-friendly data mining tool called Maltego, bringing powerful data-mining technology to the masses.

While targeted mostly to forensics and information security professionals, it is not hard to see how such a tool could be easily deployed to mine the vast amounts of personal and identifiable data people are increasingly sharing in the Web 2.0 world. No longer is it necessary to have the computational power or singular repository of data of Google or Amazon. With Maltego, anyone can scan “open data repositories” on the Web and compare the results with their own data.

Some examples of possible uses of Maltego is provided by a recent Forbes article:

Worried about information leaks your company? Input lists of employees from your rival companies, and Maltego can graphically depict how they might be related to your employees. It can also provide likely e-mail address, phone numbers and personal Web sites–and then use this information to add a new layers to the investigation.

…Curious what’s being written about your company on blogs? Try the Technorati.com transform, and parse out all the most common related tags and keywords. Or try the Spock.com transform, which queries a database billed as “the world’s leading people search engine.” Search yourself or your neighbors; Maltego’s approach is agnostic.

Agnostic, indeed. About the only restrictions placed on the use of Maltego is to refrain from performing illegal acts with the software, and to not use it for generating spam. Other than that, we are encouraged to use Maltego to collect and mine “information posted all over the internet” and uncover “hidden” information and relationships, whether “it’s the current configuration of a router poised on the edge of your network or the current whereabouts of your Vice President on his international visits.”

While some recognize the potential privacy and surveillance concerns with the fact anyone can download a free version of such a powerful tool (and the full-featured version is only $430), others make that old argument that there’s no need to worry since “Maltego doesn’t snoop into closed data repositories, but instead mines publicly available data.”

Another potentially privacy-invading tool cast aside becuase it merely is using data that is already public in the first place. Sigh.

I was surfing the article on Lonelygirl15 on TMZ.com when I came across a comment that linked to a private MySpace page that was allegedly that of the actress who plays Lonelygirl15. As the profile was set to “private,” there was no real info one could glean from the page. However, when I queried Google for that particular MySpace user name, “jeessss426,” I found a Google cache from the page a few months ago when it was still public.A lot of the details of the girl’s background clicked for me: She was an actress from a small city in New Zealand who had moved to Burbank recently to act. The name on the profile was “Jessica Rose.” When next I happened to query Google image search for “Jessica Rose New Zealand” I was instantly rewarded with two cached thumbnail photos of Lonelygirl15, a.k.a. Jessica Rose, from a New Zealand talent agency that had since removed the full size versions. A later search on Yahoo on “jeessss426” also turned up a whole load of pictures from her probably forgotten ImageShack account.

[via BoingBoing]

UPDATE: The New York Times has more here.

the emerging idea that the constant operation of a whole range of digital devices will increasingly be used as evidence against us by parties other than the state. Many of us have already encountered it, when we find ourselves listening to others’ muffled conversations deposited on our answering machine by erroneously dialled mobile phones. Thus far, much of the eavesdropping has been by accident, but there are more sinister possibilities. Many of the new mobile phones come armed with the facility to record conversations, and digital voice recorders are now so small as to be inconspicuous.

As applications are designed to imprint the date, time and location in which photographs, conversations and videos are made, and mobile tracking devices increasingly allow us to pinpoint the location of others, we can predict consequences for everyday life as well as the legal system. If mobile phones are currently an accessory to infidelity, for example, the new range of mobile devices may overturn that arrangement: a suspicious spouse can easily chance upon video, picture or location-based proof that you were not where you said you were, or commission evidence in support of their case.

[via Pogo Was Right]

Social software and Web 2.0 are concepts (or buzzwords) that have been used in order to capture recent developments on the Internet. Websites such as Flickr, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, eBay, Google Maps and craigslist are all part of this second-generation phenomenon, which has spurred a number of new services and communities. The concepts have been eagerly adopted within seemingly contradictory areas: on the one hand, Web 2.0 and social software have been associated with re-democratisation, empowerment and open content. On the other hand, they are seen as a huge possibility for profit and market control from a corporate perspective. In this seminar we offer critical perspectives on social software and Web 2.0, and we attempt to map the future challenges for research and business.

As I will be in Europe during that time, Anders was kind enough to ask me to participate. I will be presenting a talk titled “The Panoptic Gaze of Web 2.0″:

The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new information technology to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks.

But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including some that empower a growing panoptic gaze of “everyday surveillance” (Staples, 2000). Such externalities include the increased flow of personal information across networks, the rise in data mining to aggregate data across the network, the drive for intelligent agents that predict your needs, and the underlying philosophy of placing these tools in hands of all users.

In Technopoly, Neil Postman warned that we tend to be “surrounded by the
wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Which means we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies” (1992, p. 94). As the power and ubiquity of the Web 2.0 infrastructure increases, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to recognize or question its value and ethical implications, and easier to take the design of such tools simply “at interface value” (Turkle, 1995, p. 103). This talk will attempt to heed Postman’s warning and remove the blinders to
reveal the surveillance threats of two features of the Web 2.0 infrastructure: the drive towards the “perfect search engine” and the rise of “amateur data mining.”

The other abstracts can be found here. I’m very excited about this event.

[via Slashdot]]

• She canvassed local stores to see which one had a run on toilet paper, and discovered that at one store, someone bought 144 rolls of toilet paper, cheese, dog food, flour and plastic forks, the same items found on her lawn and house.
• She then got the manager of the store to show her surveillance videos, allowing her to see the personalized letterman’s jacket of one of the purchasers, as well as the license plate of the vehicle they got into.
• Finally, she used a high school yearbook (matched to the school based on the letterman’s jacket) and online databases to get the names, phone numbers and addresses of all the teens spotted in the store tapes.

A comment on Dave Farber’s Interesting-People mailing list pretty much sums this up: “we’re pretty far down the road to sheepdom when average citizens start thinking ‘well, everything’s monitored all the time anyway – let’s see if I can make use of that.’ “

Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says.

Not only are we becoming normalized to state surveillance of our everyday activities, we are being encouraged to surveil one another with these tools. Unbelievable.
[via Concurring Opinions]

It’s a convenient way to stalk learn more about your favorite Flickr user, all in one place.
[via Lifehacker]

Here’s a case showing just how easy it can be for amateurs to do a little data mining, track someone’s online activities, and perhaps even piece together some of their identity:

Over the weekend, Cory Doctorow blogged about this story of a woman lost her camera while on vacation, but the family who found it refused return it because their child liked it so much. A few days later, Cory received an e-mail from someone who claimed his name was “Don Deveny,” purportedly a Canadian lawyer, who implied that the post was illegal and that I was liable for making it. Cory doubted the legitimacy of the writer (misspelling “lawyer,” among other words, in the e-mail exchange sorta tipped him off), and decided to see what he could find out about “Don.”

Cory first contacted many of the law societies in Canada, none of whom had any record of a “Don Deveny” licensed to practice law in Canada. (BTW, it is illegal to pretend to be a lawyer). From their e-mail exchange, Cory was able to isolate the writer’s real e-mail address from the message headers, and through a Google search, find other pages that contain that address. That led Cory to a profile page for a user of the website called “Canada Kick A**” who shared the very same e-mail address. That profile page had a different person’s name (perhaps “Don’s” real name?), and also listed a location and profession for the user (he’s not a lawyer). Once Cory blogged about his discovery of this user page, its content was changed. (Cory has a screen shot of the original version on his site)

It didn’t take much to figure out (or at least get a better clue) as to who this e-mailer was.

Readers of Cory’s blog did some data mining of their own, and disovered a commenter at the original story’s site who shared many of the same sentiments of “Don,” along with many of the same spelling errors. This commentor used a different screen name, but when asked to identify himself, said he was a lawyer (Don, is that you?). Another reader then discovered that a user with that same screen name recently bid on memory cards at eBay that would have been used in the stolen camera. Have we found the thief?

NOW, a couple of my own comments.

First, this shows how easy it can be to track and cross-reference identities in different databases through examining e-mail headers, Google searches, and even IP tracking (which Cory didn’t mention doing, however). Anonymity is not easy to come by when we have so many different markers of our identity scatted throughout the Internet.

Second, many readers of the original post about the camera urged the woman to reveal the identity of the family who found it but refused to return it. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t given out their name, which is the right thing to do. Even when spurned, we should respect the privacy of those against us.

Third, Cory did decide to publish the entire correspondance between him and “Don,” as well as his real e-mail address, screenshots of the profile page, etc. I haven’t duplicated those here becuase I’m not fully comfortable disclosing that personal information (you can find it on Cory’s page if you really want it). This brings up issues of expectations of privacy, expectations that still exist even when we are trying to hide our true identity and eventually are “found out.”

And fourth, this makes me want to go and change many of my online accounts to use unique user names & e-mail addresses, limiting the ability for even an amateur to aggregate the data between my eBay purchases, Wikipedia edits, and Slashdot comments….