Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 5, 2020

Six Degrees of Corona – McConnell Edition

Filed under: Politics,Social Networks,Weaponize Data,Weaponized Open Data — Patrick Durusau @ 7:08 pm

This post is an extension of Six Degrees of Corona (New OSINT Game) which you should read first.

Six Degrees of Corona – Mitch McConnell Edition

You know the gist of the game from its similarity to six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but where would you find information for McConnell? He has no known movie credits for constructing degrees of separation.

That’s easy enough to fix. Let’s do a short list and see what others add to it:

  1. Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senator from Kentucky – McConnell’s official website. Lots of data on him and people around him. Could do a lot worse as a starting point.
  2. Federal Election Commission – You are looking for major donors, the larger the better. $20 will get you a seat to see McConnell walking away from you. I’d discard anything less than $1K.
  3. Kentucky newspapers (by circulation): The Courier-Journal, Lexington Herald-Leader, Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, Bowling Green Daily News, and, Ashland Independent. All of these will carry news about who met with McConnell, where McConnell appears at during campaigns, fund raisers, etc. (Think co-occurrence searches.)
  4. Campaign events, photograph everyone on stage but also support personnel, who come and go without even being seen. Run image recognition on your photos.

Other sources? Put your thinking hats on!

BTW, I should mention that completing your Six Degrees of Corona – Mitch McConnell edition by reducing the degrees of separation, say by becoming a waiter or busser is cheating. Complete the six degrees of separation.

May 4, 2020

Six Degrees of Corona (New OSINT Game)

Most of you have heard of “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,”

The game, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, requires players to link celebrities to Bacon, in as few steps as possible, via the movies they have in common. The more odd or random the celebrity, the better. For example, O.J. Simpson was in “The Naked Gun 33⅓” with Olympia Dukakis, who was in “Picture Perfect” with Kevin Bacon.

Kevin Bacon on ‘Six Degrees’ game: ‘I was horrified’ by Brandon Griggs. March 12, 2014.

The more general case, “six degrees of separation” between any two people in the world is usually shown as:

Generic Six Degress of Separation Diagram

Kevin Bacon is interesting for trivia purposes but he returns only 49K mentions on Twitter today. Compare President Trump grosses ~3.2 million and Joe Biden at ~2.6 million (both exact phrases so didn’t capture nicknames or obcenities).

To make an OSINT game, who are the people you can identify with either Donald Trump or Joe Biden? Those go between #5 and #6, then proceeding from them, who should go between #4 and #5? As you proceed right to left, it requires more digging to fish up people who can provide the bridge.

You will need all your OSINT skills as you compete against others to find the best path to people more popular, or should I say more notorious than Kevin Bacon?

Here are two templates, depending upon your political persuasion to get you started with the Six Degrees of Corona:

Six Degrees of Corona – Trump version.

Six Degrees of Corona – Biden version

Some wag is going to gift us with their deep legal knowledge to proclaim that intentional transmission of a disease is illegal. It’s also a violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. It’s also likely a battery (civil and criminal) in most jurisdictions. None of which is relevant to an OSINT game to sharpen your skills. The choices of images (you can supply your own) is only a matter of motivation.

Feel free to circulate these images or to create your own Six Degrees of Corona OSINT game, substituting other images as you deem appropriate.

PS: My money is on Jared being #5 for Trump. No data science for that opinion but he reeks of the closeness that would transmit most diseases.

May 1, 2020

That’s Illegal!(?) (Happy May Day!)

Filed under: Protests,Weaponize Data,Weaponized Open Data — Patrick Durusau @ 8:36 pm

Apologies for the long silence! I haven’t been sick so much as disorganized and distracted. Working on both of those and hope to mark May Day 2020 by returning to regular blogging.

One persistent question, charge or comment that I get on Facebook and Twitter to some of my bolder suggestions is: That’s illegal! So far as I know, “legal” depends on who you are, not the act in question.

Take “terrorist” bombing for example. Every US president in my lifetime (let’s just say 60+ years) with one exception, Carter, has engaged in the murder of civilians in foreign countries, by bombing. By extension, so have the troops under their commands engaged in terrorist bombings/attacks.

The same is true for both CIA and other agency operatives who engage in acts most of us would describe as murder, torture, etc. We can conclude from the lack of consequences for their acts, someone thought their actions were legal.

But if I describe how to weaponize data in order to, in theory at least, to interfere with oil or gas pipelines, refineries, airports, some wag will interject: That’s illegal! As though that is meaningful in the face of crimes that will blight the lives of millions, or worse.

True enough, some act might be “illegal” in the eyes of a system rigged to benefit the wealthy and destroy the ecosphere, but isn’t that just a caution to not be apprehended? The “property rights” of oil and gas companies that are destroying this planet have no strings that tug at my heart. Especially when compared to the rights of children to grow up in healthy, sustainable environments.

That’s illegal! most often originates from people who, having secured privileges in the present system, are loathe to see it change. If Martin Luther King were alive today and in jail in Birmingham for protesting environmental crimes, they would be named addressees. (It’s sad that letter is most often reprinted sans the addressees names. We really should know who the moral cowards of previous generations were.)

Do some acts have more consequences than others? Sure, mugging for TV cameras to “draw attention” to an issue has consequences. Using IEDs or the threat of IEDs, punching holes in pipelines not yet in use, making pipelines fail under pressure, all of those increase costs and deter investors. Given the pathological greed of capitalism, do you think drawing attention or increasing construction costs on an exponential scale are more likely to be effective?

I freely concede if you want to preserve your present privileges, by all means, listen to those who want to sustain present exploitation of people and the environment. If you want to take a chance on having a meaningful impact for the better, treat cries of That’s illegal!, as booterism for a foul present.

That said, as always, consider your present status, CIA, FBI, NSA agent, contractor (Whitey Bolger?), US military, etc., and local laws, along with your appetite for risk, when evaluating whether you should or should not use techniques described herein.

PS: I may revisit/update some old classics like Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman that has this great passage:

A special metallic bonding glue available from Eastman-Kodak will form a permanent bond in only 45 seconds. Gluing up locks of all the office buildings in your town is a great way to dramatize the fact that our brothers and sisters are being jailed all the time.

Of course you know this “special metallic bonding glue from Eastman-Kodak” by the more familiar name: Cyanoacrylate, no, sorry, “Super Glue.”

While honoring the source as Abbie Hoffman, be imaginative! Some random places where Super Glue could be appropriately applied: gas caps, lug nuts (esp. if caltrops are likely), suitcases, home/hotel/motel doors, laptops, traffic arms, anywhere with two surfaces in contact. (Be sure to check your status as a US mercenary before undertaking such uses.)

July 5, 2019

Surveilling Concentration Camps (Weaponizing Data)

Filed under: Government,Protests,Weaponize Data,Weaponized Open Data,Weather Data — Patrick Durusau @ 4:32 pm

A tweet I saw yesterday suggested surveilling U.S. concentration camps using a drone. That’s certainly possible but hobbyist type drones put you within easy visual distance of government forces. There are long range drones, all of which carry hefty price tags. What if you don’t have access to a long range drone? Alternatives?

Low-cost, low-tech answer: Consider the lowly helium balloon. With some experimenting, you can discover a stable buoyancy height for a ballon suitable for carrying a wireless digital camera.

Unlike a short range drone, you can launch a balloon plus digital camera from random and distant locations from an actual concentration camp. Launch locations are chosen based on weaponizing weather data, made available by most governments. In the United States, the National Weather Service provides current wind data and maintains historical weather data.

Once you have a stable buoyancy height for your balloon plus digital camera (password protected), record the harness and camera weight so you can create other balloons to accompany the one or more balloons with cameras at a similar height. Authorities will go nuts trying to chase every balloon down as “evidence” and it creates opportunities for balloon spotters (BSers) to call in reports of balloon sightings and landings.

For surveillance purposes, use maps of wind conditions to select launch points that will result in your balloons passing over the concentration camps of interest. Concentration camps tend to be fixed locations and as you develop more experience with local wind patterns, the more successful you will be on a regular basis.

Perhaps old school but I would insure that every balloon has a physical limit to its travels. If you can’t think of any ways to do that, ask your former eight grade (US educational system) science teacher. That’s good for the environment. Should you find balloons released by others, remember that some devices bite upon discovery. Report discovered balloons to local law enforcement.

Balloons are cheap, annoying to government officials, and provide low-risk ways to document government activities, from rain forests to concentration camps. Weaponizing weather data for surveillance is only one way to use the common balloon. Other suggestions are forthcoming.

PS: Here is one list of U.S. concentration camps. I express no opinion about the accuracy of that list or the legality of surveilling any location mentioned therein. To avoid being U.S. specific, I’m happy to update this portion of the post with pointers to other lists of concentration camps around the world. Go carefully.

November 4, 2016

Weakly Weaponized Open Data

Filed under: Open Data,Transparency,Weaponized Open Data — Patrick Durusau @ 7:06 pm

Berners-Lee raises spectre of weaponized open data by Bill Camarda.

From the post:

open-data-sabotage-460

Practically everybody loves open data, ie “data that anyone can access, use or share”. And nobody loves it more than Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, and co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI).

Berners-Lee and his ODI colleagues have spent years passionately evangelizing governments and companies to publicly release their non-personal data for use to improve communities.

So when he recently told the Guardian that hackers could use open data to create societal chaos, it might have been this year’s most surprising “man bites dog” news story.

What’s going on here? The growing fear of data sabotage, that’s what.

Bill focuses on the manipulation and/or planting of false data, which could result in massive traffic jams, changes in market prices, etc.

In fact, Berners-Lee says in the original Guardian story:


“If you falsify government data then there are all kinds of ways that you could get financial gain, so yes,” he said, “it’s important that even though people think about open data as not a big security problem, it is from the point of view of being accurate.”

He added: “I suppose it’s not as exciting as personal data for hackers to get into because it’s public.”

Disruptive to some, profitable to others, but what should be called weakly weaponized open data.

Here is one instance of strongly weaponized open data.

Scenario: We Don’t Need No Water, Let The Motherfucker Burn

The United States is currently experiencing a continuing drought. From the U.S. Drought Monitor:

drought-us-460

Keying on the solid red color around Atlanta, GA, Fire Weather, a service of the National Weather Service, estimates the potential impact of fires near Atlanta:

atlanta-fire-weather-prediction-clip

Impacted by a general conflagration around Atlanta:

Population: 2,783,418
Airports: 38
Miles of Interstate: 556
Miles of Rail: 2399
Parks: 4
Area: 27,707 Sq. Miles

Pipelines are missing from the list of impacts. For that, consult the National Pipeline Mapping System where even a public login reveals:

fulton-pipelines-460

The red lines are hazardous liquid pipelines, blue lines are gas transmission pipelines, the yellow lines outline Fulton County.

We have located a likely place for a forest fire, have some details on its probable impact and a rough idea of gas and other pipelines in the prospective burn area.

Oh, we need a source of ignition. Road flares anyone?

wsdot-flares-460-clip

From the WSDOT, Winter Driving Supply Checklist. Emergency kits with flares are available at box stores and online.

Bottom line:

Intentional forest fires can be planned from public data sources. Governments gratuitously suggest non-suspicious methods of transporting forest fire starting materials.

Details I have elided over, such as evacuation routes, fire watch stations, drones as fire starters, fire histories, public events, plus greater detail from the resources cited, are all available from public sources.

What are your Weaponized Open Data risks?

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