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The Pentagon Wants Your Secrets
Teknogeek was one of the many readers to point out today's New York Times report on what one submitter dubbed "Son of Carnivore." "This should scare you: Vice Admiral John Poindexter wants to create a supercomputer capable of hunting through electronic databases all over the world, looking for suspected terrorists. According to the article, Poindexter outlines a need to '"break down the stovepipes' that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.'" Update: 11/10 16:15 GMT by T : Here's an updated link to the (no-registration) Arizona Star. Update: 11/24 17:42 GMT by T : Thanks to expiring links, here's another updated link to the NYTimes story.
Does he think that AlQaeda has a web-enabled database of current members and operational schedules? That's about as sensible as the FBI having back door keys to encryption technologies that crims will steer far clear of.
But Poindexter, national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has said the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of electronic details of life in the United States.
I have no doubt that Bush will persuade congress to give federal departments these powers.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
When you operate above the law, there's really nothing stopping you, except from being giving the privilage in the first place.
just my 2cents.
Just how do they plan to identify these so called "Terrorists" of commercial databases ?
... what do they think terrorists do ? use the internet for their purchases ? that Al Quaeda has an online site where they secretly login by clinking on the left nipple of a certain pic in a porn site ? (and if they did, do they think they'll be able to access that db with this computer ?)
... stop invading the whole world's privacy just on the slim chance that you may catch an amateur discomformist doing stupid things, Cos this is surely NOT the way to catch real ones
How can you possibly identify terrorists by searching thru say, Amazon purchases or ubid or ebay ?
If you bought a 101 explosives book, and purchased some potassium chlorate from ebay you are surely on their list, but c'mon
C'mon
Seeing how the US treats mere suspects of terrorism in Cuba, seeing what little respect the US has for due process, I don't think they should be given more help in suspecting people.
They're so busy looking for some reason to suspect it won't take much for person X to paint person Y bad enough to have them carted off.
Sound like East Germany, Russia?
Capitalism is the new communism, all subcontracted out for profit.
Free America is the new oppressive prison state, it's big and you are not encouraged to see the walls.
Hope you are comfy.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Once systems like this are in place and capture a few terrorists, why not use them to nab dead beat dads, or to make sure that your parking tickets are paid, or better yet, introduce some statistical programs to raise little red flags at the pentagon whenever certain triggers are tripped.
I can see it now, subject buys copy of Mein Kampf, visits a Nazi website, and in come the agents to find a 18 year old writing a history freshman paper.
But what do YOU have to worry about? you aren't hiding anything, ARE YOU?
Next thing you know, they'll take my thoughts away... --Dave Mustaine
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Of course this goes far beyond terrorist hunting. Data mining like that would only be the logical consequence of events that have been taken place in legislature and executive for many months now. The outcome of those efforts would be the proverbial "glass citizen" who makes no move without being thoroughly profiled. The government (and the big corporations if you like) know more about the Glass Citizen's state of mind than he himself. Every little crime or disobedience will be found and punished. Science fiction yesterday, hard reality today (and cheered by the masses, too).
Only in the real 1984 almost everyone enjoys being big brothered like that. Everyone cheering the government on should think about the fact that terrorists (short of a grand nuclear attack) have a minimal actual physical effect on the population (speaking of cold hard percent figures). The damage they do results not from the deaths they leave behind but from the fear they create. And this damage has been immense in the US. It is due to that damage, that we allow our government to watch and eventually control us like that. Those terrorists have been incredibly successfull.
Langdon Winner argued that Nuclear power would lead to a possible infringement of our civil rights and the growth of the state due to claims to dangers from Terrorism and Nuclear dangers and thus the government suggested fix being bigger more authoritarian government...
It seems that instead of Nuclear power, the Internet is becoming danger to modern society and a hotbed seething with evil-doers..
Rather than spending billions on these systems that will become white elephants and probably never work. Political action is required in terms of Nation building (eg Afghanistan) and working with the UN to proceduralise feelings of anger toward the US and engender a feeling of equity and fairness.
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Our only consolation is that if this Poindexter fellow, and the whole totalitarian government in place these days came to conquer us, then while they may be king for a day, they too will deteriorate and quickly fade away.
Of course, here on Slashdot, our 21st Century digital boys will cheerlead the front against tyranny, but will rarely lend a helping hand except to mirror a /.ed site off their parent's cable line.
Wake up to New America, people! Forget your mass hysteria!
(I'm not mocking them either--Greg Graffin is really on top of his ballgame)
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Since he was released from his sentence, Poindexter has been working in private industry for a military consulting firm on EXACTLY the technology being proposed here. Setting aside the ethics of using your position to bebefit your former employer, is poindexter the man to decide what to do?
if we take admiral P at his word, that he never told ronny he was commiting crimes then we know he's a yahoo that cant be trusted to follow orders, laws or safegaurds on private information.
This is in keeping with the Bush admin's policy of appointing inappropriate people.
Sec DOE: Abrahams, only former experience was proposing in congress to eleminate the DOE.
Sec Interior: Gail norton, fromer mining industry lobbist
SEC head: former lobiest/lawyer for big 5 accounting firms.
Sec EPA: Christie Whitman, former govenor of NJ, reportedly accepts donations for chem industry.
Sec Labor: Can you even name the sec labor, do we still have one?
Sec Army: Former Enron top official, accepts free ski vacations from ENRON, then proposes to outsource the Utilities on Military bases to enron.
and so on....
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
'The road to hell is paved in good intentions.'
The problem with these programs is that they open up a large possibility of abuse. I do think that if the government wants to enact these decisions there should be a way to invoke a "Right to privacy" act. And making it only possible to supercede such an act would have to be okayed by a judge. That way if you don't want your porn memberships to be public knowledge they don't have to be.
I say let the government do what they want, god knows they will anyways, but create a new "Citizens of Patriotism Act" protecting the right to privacy and safety.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
There's more than one problem here. First, who gets to define "terrorist"? One man's freedom figher is another man's terrorist. Find out what Reagan had to say about the Mujahadeen in the 80s, then think about what Bush said about the Taliban (one of the components of the Mujahadeen) in 2001.
Second "the Pentagon" is nominally prevented from law enforcement. If "the Pentagon" goes trawling for terrorists in the US civilian population a principle that has served the US very well goes by the wayside: the military and the navy get used against US citizens. The old USSR shows us the dangers of that path.
Thirdly, we risk a new McCarthyism: do we really want to reinstate guilt by association? There's an extra danger in what Poindexter proposes, too. Do we want the association made by buggy computer programs?
Fouth, we risk giving up an almost sacred principle, that of due process.
-- Thomas Jefferson.Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
because (ignoring the finacial side), that's all they know how to do. The human side of spying we no longer want to do. It's all about hardware and automation. God forbid someone should actually want to go into the field and get their hands dirty.
I demand the Government stop all future terrorist attacks,
Actually, no I don't. I don't demand the government stop all terrorism. I don't demand the government stop all crime. I don't demand the government stop all war. I don't demand the government try to make life fair and perfect because the ONLY way that would happen is if the government could somehow minutely control every action of every citizen. I prefer NOT to live in such a police state.
Somehow, somewhere, someone thought that we should have both freedom and life should be fair. I'm sorry, but you have to pick one of the two and personally, I would rather have freedom, even if it means freedom for some idiot to shoot me. And I am perfectly willing to accept the consequences of freedom and not complain about it. Freedom means things won't be fair. Freedom means there will be abuses of rights and atrocities. However, I think the greater atrocity would be to live in a "safe" society where freedom is replaced by control. That's the only way the government could stop all terrorism or whatever other vice you pick.
That said, there should always be a balance between freedom and the stability that 'fairness' or 'security' brings. Choosing that balance is not trivial. However, just because you don't mind an instrusive government "protecting" you from terrorism doesn't mean others would rather risk violence in order to perserve certain freedoms.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
It doesn't matter if we're about to enter such an era. The next round of government paranoia an abuse could even be decades off. But once we have systems like this in place and accepted as a legitimate tool of government, the key ingredients will be ready and waiting for the proper catalyst.
Lets see, Im a member of the NRA, i bought a book on survival techniques ( im a camper ), involved in an 'alternative energy' news group, and i downloaded a file via P2P..
/me waits on the black helicopters.. and wonders what happened to freedom.
Currently all legal activites, but depending on how they 'search' it comes up ' potential terrorist' and i get investigated. with no true probable cause.
Guess that puts me in the wrong catagory..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The current state of affairs in our county seems to me like a cross between the McCarthy era and pre-WWII germany. Mostly our witch hunts for terrorists and our plans to 'Preemtivly Strike' nations that pose no real threat to us *cough*Poland*cough*Iraq*cough*. Nowadays it seems Terrorists instead of Communists and Muslims instead of Jews. Same situations, different scapegoats. I really have to wonder if the rest of the world sees the US as we did Nazi-Germany in the late 30s/early 40s, a powerful expanding force that needs to be stopped. Makes ya wonder if we're leading ourselves down the path to WWIII, only this time we'll be the bad guys.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Yep.
l
http://www.solai.com/forum/articles/tnoah-1.htm
I think the comparison to Germany is quite appropriate. Instead of actually talking about the real reasons such deranged terrorists are targeting us (among other things, the fact that we let dictators and multinationals run roughshod over the rights of the poor of other countries without doing anything to help achieve real justice, and in many cases with active complicity in the crimes), our boy George spends all of his time waxing eloquent about how they're evil and jealous of our success. Talk about no sense of reality.
Does that mean I think the terrorists were justified? Hell fucking no. Does it mean that I think there are real reasons that they use to justify their unjustifiable actions, reasons which we could actually do something about? Hell yes. And I'm really angry to see our President have his head so far up his ass as to appoint a convicted felon to attack MY privacy in the name of his witch hunt.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Doesn't this sound like a lot as "hunting witches"?, like say back in the 1430-1530 years, when someone said someone was a witch, and the mere accusation was enough, and we burnt them at the stake; contrary to what the facts showed?
ok, now it isn't witches, we call them "terrorists". Soon even then faintest wispher of the word "terrorist" and you'll get hunted down and shot to death (in contrary to burnt at the stake)
Maybe we aren't there yet, but it sure looks like we are hedding towards that direction. Reading a post a while ago (to lazy to find the url, but it was about "how people that look the remotest arabic got pull a side or the like after 9/11, crossing borders, driving their cars...etc etc") sure makes you think scenarios like this.
Haven't we learned anything?
Well, it appears as we haven't; history repeats itself again. Kind of makes you think if history/time is recursive on itself, that we all live in a big "loop-of-some-kind".
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Presumably the good admiral needs a security clearance of some sort for his new job. How did he get one? It's not just a technical question about the status of his felony conviction, it's what he did to earn that conviction: lie to Congress and obstruct a Congressional investigation.
Loyalty. Loyalty to the United States of America. I'd say it's the first and essential requirement for a job like Poindexter's. But when push came to shove in Iran-Contra, where did his loyalty lie? To himself and Ronald Reagan, not the American people and their democratically chosen representatives.
If Poindexter's behavior in Iran-Contra demonstrated nothing else, it demonstrated that he lacks loyalty to America and its democratic principles. And yet someone decided this unloyal convict merited the necessary clearances for the job.
Who?
Indeed, the convictions were overturned by a court of law; however, the source that you cite would seem to indicate that they were overturned not because he wasn't guilty of the crimes, but rather based on the debatable premise that immunized testimony he gave to Congress concerning Iran-Contra was used against him during trial.
It's also worth noting that, during said trial, his defense was essentially based upon the claim that he lied to Congress: he had claimed full responsibility for Iran-Contra before Congress, claiming that he had deliberately kept the president in the dark about his activities, while during trial he declared that he was innocent because he was just following the orders of the commander-in-chief. Either he lied to the court or he lied to Congress; neither possibility makes him seem particularly trustworthy. Regardless of his intelligence or experience, this is the sort of man that we really ought to be trying to keep out of the halls of power. At least, it seems so to me.
What I object to on this line of reasoning is if Iraq is a threat then all this is ok. Bad thing.
Oh come on Husains not only a fan of the Taliban "Let's kill the infidel americans" club he's a member himself.
But I can think of a greater threat to peace and freedom than a large group of religous fanatics intent on killing a whole nation of non-believers. That threat is the ability to electronicly examine every file in my computer for anything someone in power objects to me having.
Be it bomb files or the Koran.
Oh yeah thowing everyone who is Musslum in internment camps.. we haven't done this before have we?
Justification be dammed you can justify theft and murder if you just try hard enough. It remains fundementally wrong.
I don't actually exist.
This may be obvious to most americans, but I'm wondering if somebody can explain the whole democrat/republican thing to an outsider? To me, there's no difference, and either one is just trampling on whomever they feel they need to in order to keep votes from the mob, and the differences are only in what the mob thinks at the time....
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
No explanation necessary. It looks as if you have a complete grasp of the subtleties of the American two-party political system. :-)
Once again, we geeks *post a good game*, but one has to wonder why we can't back it up with a powerful lobby. If monosyllabic, rumdum rednecks can create one of the most feared and respected orgs in the U.S.(read:the NRA), why can't we? Shit, we know how to use the Internet better than anyone else. Why can't we come up with an effective lobbying voice. Because we haven't backed up our protestations with cash - it's a simple equation. Guess we don't feel that threatened yet. Famous last words there. IMOH, now is the time to act, before the situation gets really bad.
For a while I didn't concern myself with some perceived losses of privacy, since (a) I had nothing to hide and (b) if it meant staying more secure, then I'd make the trade-off.
Now I'm second guessing my wisdom.
There is a difference between "nothing to hide" and "privacy". The argument has been made that the Constitution doesn't guarantee the right to privacy, and from what I have read and remember, this is true; there is no explicit right to privacy. However, there is the Fourth Amendment:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Seems to me that this electronic dragnet is unconstitutional: no probable cause, and nothing "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
In the next war, the next Daniel Ellsberg will vanish into military detention never to be heard from again.
Dissenters will be tracked closely and neutralized very effectively.
Not that I'm paranoid or anything...
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Which country is it again, that keeps threatening to invade if its demands aren't met? Who is a threat to world peace?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
This is something that I've been pondering over for a while now. Is Israel or Palestine the terrorist? One of them has to be, while the other has to be in the "right". If one of them isn't, then, well, everything falls apart. The Chechnyans wouldn't be terrorists anymore either. Or what about the IRA? The American revolutionaries in 1776? Los Zapatos?
::looks for more stupid people::
Obviously, the U.S. had better bomb either the Israeli or Palestinian government, to free the other from oppression and establish a democracy.
Who cares who lit the fire? Bush has his Reichtag fire either way.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
The big problem here is that your gevernment agencies have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. That's the whole point of having checks and balances. That's why they exist; because your founding fathers understood that power corrupts.
Point being: to live in a free country, you will have to accept a few deaths you couldn't prevent because of the protection a free country garanties. The only way to prevent those deaths is by putting in place systems which deny you your rights. As they say, freedom does have it's price.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
The party goal was perpetual and absolute power maintianed by constant vigilence of thought word and deed of citizens, fear intimidation, hatred of the enemy, distrust of all but the party, and distruction of all emotion and loyalties exept towards the state. The Soviet Union came close to this ideal, but failed to develop the needed technology in time and failed to keep their subject from knowing that other societies had relatively better standards of living.
The remaining superpowers will take advantage of such technology as they can. Orwell bassed his predictions on carful study of human behavior exibited in India, UK, Spain and elsewhere. It is this nature he bassed his predictions on, not the technology. When the technology becomes available, it will be abused. That such abuses can openly be considered in the United States by high government officials and researchers is a tremendous blow to anyone who would argue that the US has special laws or attitudes that will protect us from human nature and Orwell's nighmare. The only thing that made the US any different was a relatively limitless frontier. Without such a frontier, the world will fall back to it's usual ways. With new technology, those ways will be more oppresive than you or I can really imagine.
Orwell also predicted that the superpowers would routinely bomb (non nuclear) their own population to maintain their hyseria. Indeed people do that kind of thing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'd be glad to, if I could.
The Dems ostensibly are founded on the notion of leaving people alone and having the US be an agrarian republic, or at least that's what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he founded them. Over the years, they've flirted with expansionism (Andrew Jackson), State's Rights (which lead to the US Civil War), and became the left-wing of the two major parties with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. (IMHO the worst president we've ever had-even worse than Nixon or Clinton, but I digress) Democrat Presidents usually appoint judicial activists to the court and advocate a strong social safety net (when it doesn't interfere with their core constituency: themselves)
The Republicans were founded in the 1850's for the purpose of having an anti-slavery political party. Along the way they've toyed with strengthening the federal union (civil war and afterwards), being active in foreign policy (late, late 19th century), being isolationist (after WWI until the 1950's), being activist in foreign policy (after that). Republican Presidents pay lip service to a free market (when it doesn't interfere with their core constituency: themselves) and tend to appoint judicial strict constructionists to the court. They'll also typically argue for a greater degree of local control and a lesser degree of Federal control in most matters (education, public assistance/welfare, most criminal justice/public safety matters).
However, these aren't hard and fast rules: It was a Dem president who pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement into force. It's been administrations of both parties who've pushed for Federal drug prohibition despite the numerous states which have tried to change their own laws on the matter. Both parties will almost always claim to be for individual freedom. However, if a proposed law is about enforcing "decency," it will USUALLY have come from a Republican. If a proposed law is about enforcing "not being racist," it will USUALLY have come from a Democrat. Laws restricting guns USUALLY come from Democrats. Laws aimed at restricting consensual sex between adults USUALLY are suppoorted by Republicans more than Democrats.
And bear in mind I've grossly oversimplified a LOT of things here. There are all kinds of regional differences as well. The Boulder, Colorado, Democrats don't look too much like the Mobile, Alabama, Democrats, for instance. And the Colorado Springs, Colorado, Republicans and the Dover, Delaware Republicans are pretty different too.