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The Anti-Thesaurus: Unwords For Web Searches
Nicholas Carroll writes: "In the continual struggle between search engine administrators, index spammers, and the chaos that underlies knowledge classification, we have endless tools for 'increasing relevance' of search returns, ranging from much ballyhooed and misunderstood 'meta keywords,' to complex algorithms that are still far from perfecting artificial intelligence. Proposal: there should be a metadata standard allowing webmasters to manually decrease the relevance of their pages for specific search terms and phrases."
Movies, such as "The Dambusters", are clearly usable as training material for further attacks, and must be withdrawn, lest the secrets of how to utterly obliterate the landscape escape the control of the UK and US Governments.
Other movies, such as "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves", encourage hostility to the duly-established authority. "Star Wars" even does so, openly in the name of religion! Incitement and fermentation of potential dissidents.
Photographs, from aircraft, is used in archaeology to locate buried ruins. The same technique could easily have a more sinister purpose. To prevent terrorists from gaining potentially useful intelligence, all arial photography needs to be banned!
Super-cooled and/or parallel arrays of computers can perform amazing feats of computation. To protect secret information, there is no recourse but to ban the use of electricity.
Thoughts cannot be monitored, and there are no accurate or reliable methods of profiling. The primary chemical involved in terrorist thinking is oxygen, which must now be reserved for official use only.
ObTrivia: NASA tested a satellite designed to detect intelligent life on other worlds, by pointing it at Earth. The probe returned a definite negative. Might we now consider the possibility that the probe was, indeed, correct?
I hate to see restrictions on information availability. but one must understand, that it is the unbalanced distribution of information that gives one entity power over another - Privacy advocates should not expect free access to information...
I believe total, omnidirectional, societal transparency is the way forward, given the existance of surveillance technology - rather than that, we seem currently headed to a "Big Brother" scenario, with a ruling body which has total access to surveillance of the public, but a public with no access to surveillance of the ruling body. This gives far too much relative power to the government.
A trivial example: The CCTV networks that have sprung up all over the country in the U.K. should be real-time public-access. And there should be public-access cameras in police stations too. That way, everybody can watch everyone else. It would also have fringe benefits - supposed to meeting someone? check if they're there yet by patching into the a monitoring station... I would predict that in such a society, ordinary day-to-day privacy concerns would not be much of an issue - some oddball getting off on watching people use the toilet would also know that he was being watched, and this would make all but the most strange people behave decently... And everyone would know who the wierdos were...
David Brin explores this in his book, The Transparent Society. Chapter one is available online here. I urge, strongly, that people read it before mouthing off on either issues of freedom of information or privacy, since otherwise, they may not be aware of the logical inconsistencies of their position. Don't eat yellow snow
Conspiracy theorists of the world unite! A few bigshots decided to let September 11 to happen, or even encouraged it to happen, in order to pull a quick one on the American public and legalize an incredibly powerful and invasive government reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 while encouraging a stupidity in the public. Restriction of liberties will continue until everyone of intelligence moves to Australia. Sound likely? Timmy
This article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald (an Australian news source). It's an editorial piece regarding the changing face of the Web (which, despite what some say, is still fairly dominated by US content). It details how some popular search engines are chopping and changing information to create 'a morally acceptable view of the world'. Anyone who's read 1984, that book that keeps getting mentioned now, will recognise something called revisionist history.
As for the common "this wouldn't have stopped the 911 terrorists" remarks. So? Are you saying that we should wait to implement such a measure until the terrorists realize that sensitive information is readily available to them directly from the Great Satan itself? Until its too late? Again? Do not condemn yourself to a purely reactive and therefore inefficient government. One where every policy must be written in the blood of innocents who died because it was not enacted soon enough. The government should be looking at how it "does business" everywhere and reform/restructure areas where that "business" could aid potential terrorists.
The truth is that the current government realizes that instead of sitting on its ass, like the previous administration, government needs to be continuously reforming itself. The government that the current administration inherited was badly in need of reforms that the previous adminstration had promised in 1992 but never carried through with. Multiple bureaus like the patent office, FAA, DOE, and INS are badly in need of serious reform. And they have been in need of it since long before 9-11.
Now the question is if some of these regulations are changed to reflect that the "public" may not be safe, what are they going to be changed too. For instance, if the public cannot audit waste and water facilities directly through what mechanism can they do so? Authorized public auditors? These need to be changes and reforms not restrictions on the rights of the citizenry. To do such a thing would be a step backwards.