{"id":1219225,"date":"2023-09-19T11:16:12","date_gmt":"2023-09-19T11:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/09\/shadowdragon-osint-internet-surveillance-ice-us-government\/"},"modified":"2023-09-19T11:20:26","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T11:20:26","slug":"not-even-fortnite-and-parenting-websites-are-safe-from-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/09\/19\/not-even-fortnite-and-parenting-websites-are-safe-from-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Even Fortnite<\/cite> and Parenting Websites Are Safe From Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

ShadowDragon, a company selling social media surveillance technology, is a contractor for the US government, including for ICE. These tools not only target social media but also gather data from video games and advice websites.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Internet surveillance contractor ShadowDragon\u2019s clients include investigative elements of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which recently switched to ShadowDragon after dropping another provider. (Andrew Brookes \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Daniel Clemens sits in a darkened room and speaks about why he thinks people should not protest. This applies to \u201cpretty much every different group that\u2019s out there protesting right now. There\u2019s probably a better way to do it,\u201d the bearded Clemens says into his microphone.<\/p>\n

Whether its people on the Left or the Right, protesters are \u201cprobably not moving the needle at all,\u201d he says, according to a video<\/a> posted online. \u201cNobody is going to listen. It\u2019s a bunch of noise. And don\u2019t be surprised when people are going to investigate you because you made their life difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clemens concludes the snippet with this closing thought: \u201cMy word of advice for anybody that\u2019s feeling invited into the rage mob of the day is, \u2018Hey man, get off social media. Go buy a lake house, get a beach house. Do something. Get in debt and get off social media. Don\u2019t get invited into all this rage.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In some cases, it is Clemens\u2019s own company that may help with the investigating. Clemens is the founder and CEO of ShadowDragon, a government contractor that is selling social media surveillance technology. According to internal emails obtained by the activist group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), ShadowDragon\u2019s clients include investigative elements of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which recently switched to ShadowDragon after dropping another provider.<\/p>\n

Beyond those emails, leaked audio from inside an industry event and a review of ShadowDragon\u2019s public comments provide more insight into the sort of people running a government contractor that says its tools can be used to monitor protests. These tools are also gathering data from video games like Fortnite<\/em><\/a> and images from BabyCenter<\/a>, a reference and pregnancy-tracking site for new and expecting parents, as well as social media sites for black people, bodybuilders, and the fetish community.<\/p>\n

The State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration have also purchased access to ShadowDragon\u2019s open-source intelligence (OSINT) research, according to public procurement records. OSINT is data that is publicly available, be that from websites or apps, that can be useful to investigators. In one video<\/a>, Clemens says the company has also worked with the FBI. In an email, Clemens said that the company\u2019s clients also include corporations and nonprofits.<\/p>\n

\u201cCompanies like Shadow Dragon collect an extraordinary amount of information from social media and other websites about the activities of internet users,\u201d said Jeramie D. Scott, senior counsel and director of EPIC\u2019s Project on Surveillance Oversight, in an email. \u201cThis type of mass surveillance, which is available to the government and other entities, creates a chilling effect on online activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Added Scott, \u201cOur interactions, associations, words, habits, locations \u2014 in essence our entire digital lives \u2014 are being collected for scrutiny now and indefinitely into the future through expanding analytical tools of black box algorithms. The abuse of such tools is not an \u2018if\u2019 but a \u2018when.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

\u201cWhy Not Take Advantage of Information the Bad Guys Share Willingly Online?\u201d<\/h2>\n \n

ShadowDragon first invented its main product, called SocialNet, in 2009, according to a video<\/a> on the company\u2019s Vimeo channel. SocialNet gathers information from \u201chundreds\u201d of different sources online, including major social media networks and smaller sites too, according to a ShadowDragon demonstration video. LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, and Venmo are all shown in the video.<\/p>\n

\u201cUncover identities, correlations, networks of associates, and available geographical information in just minutes,\u201d a description of SocialNet on ShadowDragon\u2019s website reads.<\/p>\n

In one video<\/a> on ShadowDragon\u2019s website, Elliott Anderson, president and targeting instructor at ShadowDragon, says that with SocialNet, \u201cYou can pop in an email, an alias, a name, a phone number, a variety of different things, and immediately have information on your target. We can see interests, we can see who friends are, pictures, videos.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy not take advantage of information the bad guys share willingly online? After all, they have friends lists, too,\u201d one SocialNet video says<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Clemens noted in an email that \u201cwe intentionally don\u2019t use any AI [artificial intelligence] or machine learning.\u201d Instead, he said, \u201cour OSINT tools automate the gathering of public information, allowing organizations (government, corporate, and nonprofit) to make their own decisions about what the data means in the context of their investigations and which actions to take, if any.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the videos<\/a> providing an overview of the SocialNet tool appears to show some of the search parameters available to users. One column of the SocialNet interface shows the ability to search by \u201cID card \u2014 A card used to identify individuals in the Real World,\u201d \u201cAmazon User,\u201d and even \u201cBabyCenter User\u201d and \u201cBabyCenter Photo.\u201d BabyCenter is a site geared towards<\/a> people expecting or trying to have a baby.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sounds highly unlikely that users are aware their data is being scraped by government contractors and equally unlikely that they knowingly consented to that practice,\u201d said Michele Gilman, a University of Baltimore School of Law professor who researches the intersection of digital technologies and low-income communities. \u201cIf so, it\u2019s a violation of their individual and family privacy \u2014 and their children\u2019s privacy \u2014 that could have harmful impacts depending on how the data is being used.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is certainly concerning,\u201d said Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an activist organization. \u201cWhen people post about their pregnancies to BabyCenter, I think it\u2019s safe to assume they are doing so without the expectation that ICE is watching.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the current legal environment surrounding abortion in the US, I would be extremely wary of efforts to collect data about people\u2019s pregnancies,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

BabyCenter did not respond to a request for comment. \u201cBabyCenter.com is a useful source of publicly available information for investigations relating to child exploitation,\u201d said Clemens in an email.<\/p>\n

Other forums and communities mentioned in the search parameters include BlackPlanet, a social media network for black people, Bodybuilding, a popular bodybuilding forum, and FetLife, a social network that caters for people with fetishes such as BDSM.<\/p>\n

ShadowDragon monitoring also extends to video-game platforms. In audio recorded at a recent industry event, Jonathan Couch, chief operating officer at ShadowDragon, told an audience, \u201cFortnite<\/em> is an interesting one, just because you can actually leverage Fortnite<\/em> to look at, is an alias registered there? What other aliases are also related to that alias?\u201d<\/p>\n

Couch mentioned other gaming platforms too such as those related to Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam, according to the audio recording. Jack Poulson, from transparency organization Tech Inquiry<\/a>, shared audio of the talk. Couch also mentioned Cash App and what he described as \u201cemotional sites\u201d where people leave reviews, such as Yelp and Tripadvisor. \u201cThis is another great source of information,\u201d Couch says.<\/p>\n

There is something of a cat and mouse game between companies like ShadowDragon and sites or platforms that may wish to stop such collection. Couch says if WhatsApp makes a change, for example, ShadowDragon may regain functionality in a few days. For Facebook, a few weeks. For Fortnite<\/em>, just an hour or two.<\/p>\n

Couch says, \u201cmonitoring can be used for anything from fraud protection, to insider threat, to drug gangs, to protests that are occurring.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cOne customer is talking about using it for monitoring drag racing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

\u201cThe Need to Remain Vigilant\u201d<\/h2>\n \n

ICE discusses some of its own ShadowDragon use in the emails shared by EPIC. Specifically, the intelligence section of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) at one point bought a hundred SocialNet licenses, according to the emails.<\/p>\n

\u201cDue to rapidly advancing technology and the need to remain vigilant, [Homeland Security investigators] must continuously identify tools that can enhance and support ICE\u2019s law enforcement and intelligence mission,\u201d one email reads. Other specific units or sections mentioned in the emails include ICE\u2019s Criminal Analysis and Production Division; a Cyber Crime Division; and HSI\u2019s International Intelligence Unit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Government requires a database to filter results on a wide range of variables determined by the user; such as keywords, hashtags, language, author, emoji, dates, times, expression,\u201d another document adds.<\/p>\n

The ultimate reason for the switch to ShadowDragon was because at least some of ICE was retiring its use of another tool, according to the emails. \u201cBabel X is expiring, and ShadowDragon will be taking its place as a social media exploitation tool,\u201d one email reads. Babel X is another tool made by a similar company called Babel Street. Customs and Border Protection uses Babel X<\/a> to screen travelers, which can include US citizens and refugees.<\/p>\n

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Scott from EPIC added, \u201cICE should be very transparent about its use of surveillance tools like SocialNet and very specific about how the surveillance tools are used and how many people are implicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Clemens\u2019s thoughts on protesters, he added in an email that \u201cmy comments from the podcast refer to ALL groups, regardless of affiliation or cause. It was a reminder to everyone that everything we do in public, including social media posts, often lacks a legal expectation of privacy, in the same vein as the [Electronic Frontier Foundation\u2019s] recommendations<\/a> for protestors.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n

You can subscribe to David Sirota\u2019s investigative journalism project, the\u00a0Lever<\/i>,\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel Clemens sits in a darkened room and speaks about why he thinks people should not protest. This applies to \u201cpretty much every different group that\u2019s out there protesting right now. There\u2019s probably a better way to do it,\u201d the bearded Clemens says into his microphone. Whether its people on the Left or the Right, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29545,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219225"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29545"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1219225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1219227,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219225\/revisions\/1219227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1219225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1219225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1219225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}