TOM KEENAN: I'm going to actually start while they try
to set this set up.
I'll tell you a little bit about what we are going to talk about.
The open data is a movement and it has to do a lot
with the idea that the government has information
on you.
We all know a lot about that.
But legitimately they collect all kinds of stuff.
They collect bus schedules.
They collect voting records, things like that.
So the reason there's an open data movement
is because in fact there is a need for it, right?
We want to know the bus time.
And let's face it, governments are not always
the best writers of software.
I'm a professor.
I spent a frantic two hours yesterday trying to deal
with a government grant software in Canada because it was designed
by civil servants.
Often it's best to actually say: Let the community go out and design it.
In New York City, for example, all the subways have
a sign up: "Our transit apps are whiz kid certified."
That means the MTA didn't do them.
They let other companies create applications
to use their data which they make available openly.
One of the reasons governments open up the data is in the interest
of giving better service to customers.
Another one relates to the fact that if they have the data,
they figure sooner other later somebody will put it
out on Wikileaks anyway.
They might as well release what they have.
The ability to go out there and see the government data seems
to be a natural thing.
It resonates with the whole spirit of DEF CON which is data wants
to be free.
Data wants to be open.
As a result, governments are opening up more
and more of their data.
The other thing, of course, is they are cheap.
They don't want to go out there and spend money
on building applications if other people will do it for free.
The reality is, we have a lot of good reasons.
I am not -- this is kind of the big preamble.
I am not against open data.
Open data is great.
There are open data hackathons all over the world.
They have basically the advantage of getting the best minds to take
the government's data and think of creative uses.
If you have four kids and need to take one to the soccer field
and one to the baseball diamond and you want to optimize that,
that's good.
The problem is that a lot of the government the -- data
the government collects is related to people.
I'm still hoping we will see images
because I have images to share with you.
I'll tell you one example relates to voting.
It's pretty obvious in a democracy that we want
to know what the voting results were.
So just, and this is an example that I cooked
up to illustrate one of the problems with open data.
We have a city in Alberta called Edmonton.
It has a wildly popular mayor, Stephen Mandel.
He got over half the votes in every ward.
When they published the votes there were minority
candidates, people who only got a few votes and got zero votes
in some areas.
Say Mr. Dowdele, one of the other candidates, the wife was
in the hospital and she says, "Yes, dear, I voted and I voted for you."
He goes and pulls down the online data and guess what?
He got zero votes in the city wide hospital poll.
That's a type of torturing of data that
the government never anticipated.
They never anticipated we would ask questions like that of the data.
So the term torturing data in my title really relates
to doing what most people in this room love to do, which
is to go out there and find things that you are not supposed to be able to find.
So when people ask what is DEF CON?
I say basically it's not people who are doing things that they shouldn't do.
It's people doing things that they shouldn't be able to do.
And you can do that with data quite effectively.
So again while we are praying to the A/V Gods there,
I'll start telling you about an example.
We'll go through it quickly when the video comes up.
There actually was a challenge called
the open data challenge held in Europe.
They gotten tries from most of the EU countries.
The one that won was from Slovenia.
I can't speak Slovenian, so I can't say the name.
But it translates as: From our taxes.
What they did is they actually took all the government contracts that were
registered online and they started going
out there and putting them together and finding
out what names were in common.
Which people were the directors of different companies,
which people were the lawyers who represented
the deals and so on.
And an interesting thing happened: A woman named Ludmilla decided this
was invading her privacy.
She actually convinced a judge in Slovenia to go out there and
to order the NGO that created this, award winning application,
to take down the data.
Somebody asked me before the talk how technical this
is going to be.
This is about as technical as it gets.
They didn't have that data.
That data was scraped off government databases that were
maintained by the government.
So here we have a judge, and it proves
the old saying that judges are about ten years
behind the average member of society
in understanding of technology.
Yes, that's right.
Yes, thank you.
And so the judge is ordering them to take down this information.
And they can't take it down because they don't really have it.
I suppose they could put filters into their program that somehow allow
them to go out there and to get that information trapped so that it
couldn't be revealed, but it just kind of shows a misunderstanding,
appear fundamental misunderstanding.
Do we have any hopes back there, guys?
(Speaker away from microphone.) TOM KEENAN:
Hope springs eternal, I guess.
I could hold the screen up and give everybody a telescope
or something like that.
Let's talk about other kinds of open data.
We have a member of the legislative assembly
of Alberta who had the misfortune to do two things wrong.
On a government trip he solicited a prostitute and got caught.
His name is Mike Allen.
It was all over the news.
I said okay, what else can I find out about Mike Allen?
I went to a database.
I went to the Ramsey County, Minnesota, sheriff's office database.
There is poor Mike's information on what he was doing,
the fact that it was gross.
They use the word gross misconduct.
And his home address.
And that's where things get pretty interesting.
If you think about it, having his home address up there,
it's private information in a sense.
Hey, he was arrested, some sheriff in Minneapolis took that and posted it.
We have different countries have different regard for privacy.
So anybody from Germany here?
(One cheer.) TOM KEENAN: If you're from Germany, you're the best.
The people from Facebook they can't even operate are in Germany.
Everything is against the law there.
Canada is between germ nip and the U.S.
A lot of things you can get away with in the U.S.
in terms of posting information on people would not fly in Canada.
To take that specific example I'm sure if this guy was arrested
they wouldn't willy-nilly put up the information about where
he lives because what is the need for that?
But in the United States there's certainly a tendency to do more
and more of that.
One of the photos if we get to it, I will be able to show you, it's
from Henderson county, Florida.
Henderson County is a place you never want
to get arrested.
Those from Germany who don't know, the sheriffs are elected officials,
dog catchers, people like that, they get to be what they are
by having people vote for them.
The reality is, they go out there and want to show that
they are doing their job.
They are actually a good sheriff.
What better way than to actually arrest people?
And sure enough, in Henderson county, they post the mug shot
of everyone who is arrested.
If you are done for speeding or whatever down there,
and there's a really seedy -- and we may have the slide one
of these days.
If we do, you'll see seedy characters, people you would cross the street
to avoid, who have been arrested.
You'll also see a photo of a 12-year-old boy.
I captured that information off the government database
and used it in my presentation.
Now, I obscured his name.
First name is Bobby.
I obscured the surname.
Put a black bar across his eyes so you can't see
Bobby's personal identity, but the sheriff didn't do that.
The first thing to realize, he's up there, a minor child, 12 years old.
He's being permanently tarred in some ways.
Now, you say, well, not really permanently because after all,
it's only up there for 30 days.
The answer is yeah, but it's been in my presentation for over a year now.
When data is out there, it is -- there's no way to call it back.
There's no way to bring data back into the fold if you've let it loose.
This brings a lot of vulnerability.
The reality is quite a bit of data is being put out there,
captured by people.
They say if you put a photo up on Facebook,
at the very least it's been copied by the NSA, but probably by a lot
of other people as well.
There's no way to call back data from being posted somewhere.
One aspect again, I'm randomly remembering
my presentation.
I usually print out a cheat sheet, but I trusted the tech here.
Ha-ha.
(Cheers and applause and laughter.) TOM KEENAN:
Another aspect relates to DNA information.
How many of you know ancestry.com?
Or ancestry.co, all the different versions.
I won't ask because it's embarrassing to ask, who has profiles on that?
The business of ancestry, they allow you to sign
up for 14 days for free and do all kinds of exploring with their data.
They are using public information, census data.
They are using military records, prison records, all kinds of things.
Those are particularly useful for Australia.
Lots of prison records down there.
And so they take all this data.
They make it freely available to you for 14 days.
On the 15th day they charge you $299 if you don't cancel the membership.
It's an interesting model.
They take public data and make money from it.
We assume that's probably okay.
The second thing, of course, they, after you leave, after you tell them, hey,
I don't want to sign up for $299, they go out there and
they keep the data.
They know your family tree.
You have enriched their database and guess what?
You can never -- you can cancel your account.
You can check into the Hotel California.
You can never check out your data.
It is permanently part of their database.
A few years ago they got a brain wave.
You know what would make this a lot better?
Send us your DNA and we'll tell you if you are descended from Adam
or Noah or whoever is way, way back in your family tree.
Some people were actually dumb enough to send their DNA.
Doing that, of course, provides
a tremendous amount of information.
If you think about it, with DNA information it's not just
about you.
It's about your siblings, your family, all kinds of people who didn't give any
consent for you to give that information.
So the reality is, putting DNA information
out there is risky.
Giving it up voluntarily is dumb.
And privacy international, the NGO in the U.K.
actually launched a lawsuit against ancestry.com.
Now, I was down in Utah and I thought I would visit
ancestry.com and I tried to find out all about this.
They said oh, well, we just keep the database here.
That's the genetic genealogy project and it's with the smart people
down in California.
So the genetic genealogy project is something to worry about.
The possibility is out there for somebody
to get tremendous amounts of information on you.
Do we have any hope back there?
Hope springs eternal?
(Speaker away from microphone.) TOM KEENAN:
You're getting closer?
(Speaker away from microphone.) TOM KEENAN:
Everyone leave your laptop at the door, right?
A couple of principles on dealing with this data.
The New York City released with great fanfare
in 2009 New York City data mine.
They had 210 databases.
There they had interesting things like all the women organizations
in New York City are now in this database.
They realized a day later that they had forgotten to take
out the private e-mail addresses and the secret questions.
So what was your first pet is the most common secret question.
And fluffy is the most common answer.
That information was disclosed out there.
You know, the next day there were only 109 public databases
from New York City because they had to go in there
and take back some of that information.
I want to explain an experiment to you that I did with what
is called open Philly.com.
Philadelphia is one of the leading cities
in making data open.
They went out and actually put online
contribution records.
Because it's an international audience, it varies a lot from country to country,
but in the United States there's laws about campaign contributions.
Those over $200 say that if you are making a contribution,
you have to go occupant and give your name, address and occupation.
Those are public.
Philadelphia took all the contributions, even those of $1.49
for the last seven years retroactively and put them
up in a wonderful database.
We are going to get technical one more time.
It was put up there with a front end that said you can query
this database, but hey, you better not go
out there and actually download it.
It is not for downloading.
Here is how you download it.
Any of my computer science students who didn't get this get an F.
First you say download all the people whose name begins
with A.
Then the last name beginning with A, and then last names, B and C and D.
See the pattern?
Within a few minutes we had a comma separated file
of all these contributions.
Then you torture the data and have fun with it.
What can I find out?
Who in this room knows who Ronald
Rivest is?
There is a candidate, named Shelly something
or other in Philadelphia.
All of her contributions seem to be local
except one came from Massachusetts.
Who was it?
It was Ron Rivest.
He obviously endorsed this candidate enough that he sent money to her.
By plotting the data on a bit of a graph I was actually able
to find some interest things.
The most interesting thing I found was that an awful lot of people
in Philadelphia live in the same place.
1719 Spring Street.
I mean, thousands of people live there.
(Laughter.) TOM KEENAN: I went: What the heck is this?
I went to Google maps and brought it up.
It is the offices of the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers.
So when Guido comes in and is going to get a job,
they say "Come over here and make this contribution."
Oh, yeah, I have to do that.
You fill out the form.
When people do campaign contributions, they put
the address down because they want
the tax receipt.
Maybe he's in the witness protection program
or something and doesn't want to use his address.
They use the address of the union.
A significant number of the contributions
to some candidates come back to one address, the union.
I thought I would run a statistical study.
I found out the most common names in the United States, Jones and Smith.
And I did an analysis.
The only reason really to publish the name and address
of political contributors that I could see is if there's two John Smiths
and you want to know which one it is.
I actually did a statistical test.
I found there were 385 J.
Smiths and the actual power or the need to actually resolve duplicates
came down to only about three or four.
There was almost no information added by having this, but there was
a zipping can't privacy risk.
So what I'm suggesting to governments is that they need
to go out there and think long and hard about how they put
out the data, why they put out the data.
Again, I don't know if we will ever get the images.
We are going to have a flash dance of the images if we get them up here.
You have a complete stalking exercise I did on a notable Albertan.
He was the president of an airline.
I said tell you the truth, I started with the premiere of the province.
I said how well does he protect his privacy?
The first test was, is his phone number unlisted?
It was.
I worked down to other people.
I found the president of a pretty big airline whose home
number is listed.
It is still listed if you look hard enough.
I went from -- (Cheers
and applause.) TOM KEENAN: Hey, we have the technology!
Okay!
So monkey, or whoever is back.
Work with me darling.
Make it happen.
Go forward.
Just keep -- I'll say next, next, next.
We talked about this.
Stop right there.
New York City.
This is one we didn't talk about.
New York City data mine where the women's organizations were outed.
So there's a problem which is neglecting
to weed and redact data before releasing it.
Next slide.
Yes, Toronto.
You call 311, you complain about something.
Sure enough, in Toronto they built a database of that.
They are supposed to be careful to anonymize it.
We have six digit postal codes.
They are supposed to put in the first three.
I looked at the database.
Sometimes they go and put actual intersections.
Sloppy, lazy data entry, the next problem.
Next slide.
This is actually from my place in Calgary.
Do any of you know C click fix, you want to report a pothole or
a place where criminals hang out, you go anonymously
on this system and you enter the data.
Sure enough, in Calgary somebody hates
the car wash in his neighborhood.
Every day he puts in excessive noise, dangerous ice.
He has a hate on for that car wash.
Next slide.
Okay, this is the European data channel.
Next slide.
Who won?
There it is in Slovenia, from our taxes.
Next slide.
Okay, who wouldn't agree with that?
Well, the judge ordered them to take down the data.
Next slide.
A little technical side.
They couldn't take down the data.
Judges lag behind technology much we know that.
Next slide, election results.
There's the guy who got all the votes.
Next slide.
Did my wife vote for me?
Apparently not because all these people got
zero slides.
Philadelphia, finance records.
Next slide, there it is, full home addresses provided.
Next slide.
Okay, that's the kind of computer that we had.
I had one of those come doors.
Anybody have a pet?
Yeah.
1970s when they wrote the election law.
Maybe they're a little out of date.
Next slide.
There's the kind of stuff I can get.
Ronald Rivest's home address if you want to write to him.
Yes, that's Ron and all of his family gave
to Barack Obama in this case.
Next slide.
Let's keep going.
Next slide.
So the files were downloadable.
Next slide.
Common names, Smith, Johnson, Williams.
That's the number of Smiths and Johnsons,
very small number of duplicates.
Next slide.
It was really useless and when I looked at the address on spring street,
next slide.
There it is, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
Inconsistent data like some people giving home address,
some giving the union.
And the why are we requiring an address needs to be examined
in the light of new tools.
Next slide.
There's the guy, Clyde Beddow.
There's his home address from the phone book.
Took out the phone number.
It's still valid.
Property tax assessment, next slide.
Details of his property tax.
Next slide.
There he is plotted on a map.
His house is worth 710 less.
The neighbors less.
This is an industry of writing letters.
Dear Mr. Beddow, you are assessed this much money.
Do you know that your neighbor is assessed at 414,000?
Would you like us to appeal your taxes?
The city had to shut down the database.
They now have technical and legal safeguards which are dumb.
You can only query ten times from an IP address in a day.
Anybody in this room can spoof that one.
Next slide.
Next one?
Here is Hernando County, the sheriff, next slide.
Smiley face.
There is not so friendly people who got arrested for things
like uttering forged instrument and contempt of court.
Next slide.
Poor Bobby, that's real.
1997, that made him 12 years, 12 months at the time of arrest.
Shame on you, sheriff.
Data journalism.
I lived in the Bronx for a long time.
The Backman County newspaper listed people with pistol permits.
Sure enough, one of them lived in the Bronx on Milltown Road
a few blocks from where I lived.
This is public information.
You get interesting results.
People have pistol, multiple pistol permits
and live opposite an elementary school.
Next slide.
Should the rich have less privacy?
When we go out and do data journalism
on rich people like corporate directors we can go
out there and find people ab abusing the SNAP food stamp program.
Interesting societal questions, do we go after those people or just
the easy pickings, the high profile ones?
Indirect risk.
People collecting this data like check point.
Ancestry.com, they have 6 billion records mostly
courtesy of the public.
Next slide.
There is your DNA test.
They want your DNA and charge you $99 to take it from you.
Next slide or if you're in New York City there's mobile
DNA testing.
All you have to do is flag him down, there he is.
He will tell you who your daddy was right on the spot.
Or who your daddy isn't.
(Cheers and applause.) TOM KEENAN: Next
slide, please.
There is the complaint against him from privacy international.
Next slide.
Tools that we use for this.
Inquiry mind, that's the important one.
Having a motive like financial motive, ID theft, et cetera.
Scripting language, Scraper Wiki again, getting Python, PHP scripts.
All this stuff is out there.
There are libraries of scripts, if you want to do it, go to a hackathon.
Some friendly person will tell you how.
Companies like ChoicePoint actually go out there and
they pay high school students to go into the basement
of courthouses and hand copy people's divorce settlements
because you are not allowed to photocopy them and not allowed
to download them electronically, but they are public information.
Once that stuff gets put into a public file as it
is at ChoicePoint it can be accessed for a fee.
One guy can never get a job.
He didn't know why.
He was an engineer.
He would get interviewed, never hire.
He finally got a friend to pull his private file from choice point.
What was it?
He was a convicted murderer.
Well, he wasn't actually a convicted murderer!
They got his Social Security number wrong.
His friend said you know why you're not getting a job.
They said you're a murderer.
He said no, I'm not.
Next slide.
Here are the dirty dozen.
Sloppy data entry, malicious information, lag
between law and policy, making inferences
from the small numbers like very few people who voted.
Assuming nobody like me will torture the data.
My name is Tom and I torture data.
Next.
Inconsistent data.
Where, you know, I did a project with the Rand corporation years ago
where we were collecting data on New York City fire trucks.
We had people getting from the battery, like battery park to Harlem
in a fire truck in three minutes and 402_nd_s.
We couldn't figure out how that could be.
They are not helicopters.
We watched them.
And what happened, the guy who sits
next to the driver was recording the data.
They would go out and put fires out all day and say oh, we forgot
to do that, but the Rand guys, we need to fix it.
They made up the data.
Jigsawing, taking data public and private and putting it together.
Facial recognition, big area coming up.
Your face can be.
Somebody stood here last year and said he can take your photo
on Facebook, compare it to a photo on Match.com, and tell
if you're Sexy Babe or you're Hung Dude 204.
He can disambiguate those using your face.
Recommendations, we have to scan the file for PII things that need
to be included.
This is on the CD.
I don't need to read it to you.
Next slide.
I want to tell you a little bit about this image.
There's a great project out there, concepts for all.
It basically is, I want to end on a hopeful note.
There was a poster program at the University of Quebec in Montreal,
a design program going to be shut
down because it's so expensive to print posters.
My friend discovered the Internet.
Now all these images get posted on the Internet.
They are beautiful images.
The only condition for using them for something like this
is that you say this was courtesy of Elyse Pachef.
I did that.
I recommend that you talk to the government.
We are the people.
We are the democracy.
We get to decide supposedly what our governments do to or for us.
This is an area you will be hearing much more about.
I promised to stay on time.
I think I have five minutes for questions.
Is that about right?
Okay.
So let's have the first question.
Thank you!
(Cheers and applause.) TOM KEENAN:
Thanks for all the hard working goons who made this come up there.
We paved the way for first speakers.
It's hard to get the first question.
I'll answer the second question.
Who has a question?
Okay.
Turn him on, please.
AUDIENCE: I would rather stay off the stage.
I don't want to be recognized.
There is a movement in the United States to crack
down on perceived voter registration fraud.
It's mostly bullshit, but that's the way to keep black people from voting.
(Cheers.) AUDIENCE: But in general, I think governments feel
like if you require people to provide an address it keeps them honest even
if it isn't particularly useful.
Is there another way you can think of to keep people more honest.
TOM KEENAN: Is there another way?
AUDIENCE: Should we stop worrying about it,
actual voter fraud where somebody pretends to vote or votes twice,
it's hard to find an instance.
What do you think?
TOM KEENAN: You can take their DNA, all kinds of things you can do.
The point of the address.
AUDIENCE: (Speaker away from microphone.) TOM KEENAN:
You can do -- he asked how you can do something
other than addresses to eliminate voter fraud and I joked you
can take people's DNA.
There are countries in the world where people vote.
They get their finger marked with ink and sometimes
they don't want to vote because they might get that finger cut
off by somebody or be punished by voting.
There are alternative ways of doing it, but I can't think of too many other ways.
If the contribution is small enough, the reality is giving
the address is optional.
Give the address of the union and never go pick up the result.
Campaign laws, the big idea is that the campaign law needs to be reviewed.
It was passed in the 1970s.
We didn't have the technology to do the kinds of things we do now
with the data.
It's only going to get bigger.
The data now is going to stick around forever.
So they will go back seven years, but maybe 27 years.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: (Speaker away from microphone.) TOM KEENAN:
Scraper Wiki has a whole bunch of tools.
I used Excel because that's all I really had to use to take that,
but in the presentation there are those lists of Scraper Wiki and so on.
There are a bunch of places where you have customized
scripts that allow you to go out there and scrape public databases.
The world is your oyster.
I think every municipality now has something like that.
We find more and more.
I haven't found one I don't have problems with.
The challenge between now and next year is to find more holes
in open government and bring them to our attention.
One more question maybe?
Going once?
You have one more.
TOM KEENAN: Good.
AUDIENCE: Do you know if any of those terms of service
for public data requests have been tested in courts?
TOM KEENAN: I don't, and I actually asked Marcia Hoffmann
that question and she's researching that.
I thought that's an interesting thing.
All I can tell you in Calgary, I'll summarize the story.
Because of people doing what I did and also because of that secondary use
of the data to actually try to commercialize it, the city shut
the database down for a period of time and when it came back there
was a very elaborate terms of use.
I violated it here today because it says this is only
for checking your tax records because when it first came
out people were checking their boss's house assessment.
They were checking their ex-wife, everybody that they knew.
They now control it.
So what they've done, and it's a good point.
They have two different levels of access.
If you want to just know -- I should tell you, you are allowed
to know what your neighbor is assessed because that
is an issue of fairness.
If you are assessed on fair, you have a right to feel.
You are not allowed to know the square feet and
all the other details one.
They have a public facing one, there's a deeper level that you have
to sign up and be validated.
That's what Calgary did; an admirable job of taking
a real mess and making it good.
Hopefully other cities will follow that lead.
Are we done?
MODERATOR: We're done.
TOM KEENAN: Thanks very much.