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Pentagon Soft-Pedals Total Information Awareness
PizzaFace writes "Congress was concerned that the Pentagon's 'Total Information Awareness' program would invade citizens' privacy, so it gave the program the red light until the Pentagon addressed Congress's privacy concerns. DARPA, the Pentagon technology agency that brought us the Internet in more innocent times, showed its Total Marketing Awareness by renaming the TIA program, 'Terrorism Information Awareness.' The gist of its report seems to be that data may be collected from everyone, but it will only be used against evildoers. You can read DARPA's report and a background story from the Washington Post."
You in the US have been and always will be circling the same issues about security and rights of freedom etc. You need to feel hugely secure about yourselves, and still cling to your freedom of speech and freedom to bear arms. Would you feel lot safer with modified laws about all of those? Neither one cannot be compromised. Make an omelette without violating the rights of the egg.
Well, I find it merely amusing. That's all.
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
I like how they changed nothing about this plan exept for the name, Do they really think we're all that stupid?!
Sometime back, MS dropped the name Palladium and called it Next Generation Secure Computing Base, or some such silly name. The trick is to give a bad name to a bad project and then all of a sudden change the name to something else - problem solved.
It happened with Trustworthy Computing Platform Alliance as well - TCPA is now TCG.
Since TIA has been extensively criticized, especially at Slashdot, why not give it a very bad name indeed - Terrorist Information Awareness, and get away with it! Bright idea. The magic word terrorist seems to open all locks.
When I get my hands on LongHorn, I'm gonna try username terrorist and password Billyboy. Should be interesting to see what happens.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
It appears more than a few people are concerned about total information awareness (that's what it is, and that's what I will continue to call it) and losing their basic rights. With bullsh!t like this, the US is no longer the land of the free. Police state, here we come. *starts writing futile letters to greedy representatives*
Oh well. I wasn't using my Civil Liberties anyway.
Right....
I don't suppose anyone's heard of the events this week surrounding Texas Democrats and the Department of Homeland Security, eh?
Long story short: all 51 Democrats from the Texas State Legislature ran to Oklahoma for 4 days to prevent the State from addressing some redistricting issue (there wouldn't be a quorum of legislators, and thus nothing could be voted on). Anyway, pretty much all the Republican legislators shit a brick, and somehow it seems the Department of Homeland Security got dragged into the search for the missing Democrats (yes, the same federal agency supposed purpose is to protect the entire U.S.A. from terrorists). Oh, and if that isn't enough, it seems that all Texas Department of Public Safety documents regarding the Department of Homeland Security's involvement in this fiasco were ordered destroyed.
So, forgive me if I take a wee bit of convincing on this whole "TIA will only be used on foreigners" thing...
P.S.: Seriously, folks, it scares the shit out of me that the big news organizations aren't picking this story up and running with it.
Something is horribly wrong in this Nation; not in the usual
"corruption and racism" way, but far far worse in the "fascism and rogue
police state" way.
I now know how the Jews of Germany felt as they saw the vise-grip of
Nazism clamp down. Insiduously and calculatingly, the Nazi party coopted
and overran the legitimate elements of Germany's government. Nazism
failed only by the grace of God and because Hitler overreached, and
through sheer sacrifice by free people.
Tomorrow the world may not get off so easy.
Bush did not win the election. He remains the commander in chief
because his family and party connections illegally scuttled Gore's
contestation of the ballot-count. That illegal manoeuvering was effectively
cloaked in false legitimacy and hidden from public view, and amounts to a
successful coup de'tat against the legitimate government and sovereign
power of the United States of America.
These are dark times for the land of the free, the home of the brave.
As grave as that one issue is, I am not writing this letter in
condemnation of it alone nor is it the only Hitler-order threat to Freedom and
Democracy.
September Eleventh, 2001 has left a trail of unanswered questions and
betrayed trusts. The act of terrorism which took thousands of American
and foreign Human lives has been followed by events which to say the
least threaten the continued functioning and existence of our Democracy,
and point to a threat, possibly internal, which must be investigated.
These investigations have been called for and they have been impeded and thwarted
by the very entities which have fallen under suspicion.
These facts in themselves warrant a total investigation with all
urgency and priority as this Nation can muster. My belief in the just nature
and effective coordination of my Country, the United States, would
allay my suspicions and I would stand observant as established processes
assessed the facts and derived the truth, except this:
Bush has quietly gutted the very laws which make this nation Free and
Just, and openly pushed bills like the Patriot act I & II which put any
dissent into deep freeze or worse.
All these problems are beyond unnacceptable and it is in the character
and interest of the United States to meet them openly and with vigor.
The reality that our supposedly "liberal" media quietly ignore these
facts when they should be shouting them from every rooftop, lends ultimate
urgency to our problem: Our Nation, the torchbearer of humanity, is
under assault AND WE THE PEOPLE ARE LOSING.
The assault must be halted and routed if we are to prevent this
government and its' sacred values of Freedom, Liberty, and Justice for all are
not to perish from this earth. The defilers have craftily and
skillfully put up strong barriers to their prosecution but as a Nation WE CAN
defeat those barriers IF DARE. The mechanisms of our government are
being dismantled but the Nation is still fundamentally free; a well
performed campaign to bring the truth into the mind of every man and woman
must not fail, can not fail. The only failure is in not trying! And it is
our duty to those who died in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War,
every foreign war and to the victims of September Eleventh 2001 to Stand
UP for the Truth!
We have nothing to fear but fear itself. We have nothing to lose that
we will not lose if we do not Speak Out. We must marshal every resoure
at our disposal and launch the counteroffensive now; we have already
waited too long. The threat to our way of life, indeed to our lives
themselves, grows with each day. The threat fouled one election without
control of the White House -- in 2004, the adversary will not even need to
rig a single ballot. A second victory will cement their control. The
fall of the nation has begun and it wil
I say we give the Pentagon to China, since they seem to have some pretty compatible thoughts on freedom.
Could someone please tell me what Americans are so afraid of? Why do you put up with the government invading your privacy? The US have gone to war to liberate other nations from government which have done similar thing (Not on the same level of cause and with less advanced tecnologies). Why are you letting them do this to you?
I don't get it, the US is suppose to be the land of the free, isn't it ?
Today I watched Michael Ruppert defending his theory regarding massive government collusion in the 9-11 terrorist attacks. The other panelists, predictably, were not convinced, and the arguments they used to refute Mr. Ruppert were the same ones we have heard repeatedly every time this particular "conspiracy theory" starts to see daylight. Why were military jets not scrambled to intercept the hijacked planes? Human error. Why did American intelligence ignore the warnings from foreign sources regarding the impending attacks? Outdated and bureaucratic organizations that don't talk to each other. How did a rag-tag bunch of known troublemakers manage to board the doomed flights in the first place? Lax airport security.
A point-by-point refutation of Mr. Ruppert's argument holds up well on the surface. Why? Because it is just that - a point-by-point refutation. Any one of these arguments, taken by itself, makes sense, particularly to a people who are still dumbstruck and grieving, a people who have been educated, both through the school system and through daily interaction with their friends and neighbors, to believe that the Americans are the Good Guys, decent and benevolent, right-thinking and honest.
And most Americans are just that. So facing people who are not that way sets up a clamor of cognitive dissonance that can be heard from from sea to shining sea. Into that cacophony of disbelief step the clean-up crews, the experts and pundits who emanate from government-sponsored think tanks, and participate in panel-style discussions such as the one with Mr. Ruppert. These "experts" are quick with the anecdotal counterpoints - and they seem pretty believable until - and unless - one takes the time to step back and take a longer view.
In an excellent piece entitled, "Uncle Sam's Lucky Finds," published by the Guardian Unlimited on Tuesday, March 18, 2002, Anne Karpf deftly navigates the scattered, pundit-tossed bread crumbs, and offers an extremely compelling view of American intelligence propaganda at its finest.
For while it is credible to assume that the various alphabet soup agencies that constitute our national security system might have missed India, France, and Russia chirping something about terrorist attacks as early as last spring, it is not credible to argue that these same agencies - who prior to September 11 could not find their arse with both hands - had, within weeks of the attacks, successfully identified all the hijackers. Following a trail of fortuitously placed flight manuals, Korans, "terrorist handbooks," (and please think about that one for a moment), and most amazingly of all, an unscathed fragment of Mohammed Atta's passport, the feds moved swiftly to construct a case implicating royal Saudi bad boy, Osama bin Laden.
It is possible, I suppose, that one of the hijackers would become careless and leave a flight manual lying around, or that the hand of some unseen deity would pluck Mr. Atta's smoldering passport out of the ruins of the WTC, (and then lay it gently at the feet of an FBI super-sleuth), but taken together, the improbability of such serendipity rapidly begins to become an impossibility.
Due to the enormity of the operation - and perhaps also due to the Pentagon's budgetary needs - shortly after the event, the terrorism experts began speculating about how September 11th could have been planned, financed, and perhaps even rehearsed, without arousing suspicion. They posited that underground cells of terrorists had lain hidden in sleepy suburban bedroom communities for perhaps as long as a decade, flying under the radar and waiting for their appointed hour to strike.
Again, taken by itself, this is a plausible explanation. But lay these stories next to the ones that tell us of devout Muslim suicide bombers preparing for a holy war by making a trip to Hooters, drinking heavily, and then leaving their apartments strewn with terrorist paraphernalia. That's when the official version begins to leak like a used condom. Are we to b
"DARPA affirms that TIA's research and testing activities are only using data and information that is either (a) foreign intelligence and counter intelligence information legally obtained and usable by the Federal Government under existing law..."
I feel particularly reassured as a non-US citizen. Am I right I thinking there are no legal restrictions at all in the US on what intelligence they can gather on me?
I think it's about time the citizens of the extended United States of America got the vote. Currently those of us who live in places like the UK and Iraq are effectively ruled by the US but have absolutely no say in the government ...
Hope for you it doesn't get this harsh. Terrorism is the perfect excuse for them: even though the last years were the lest violent in a terrorist point of view in Spain, our (spanish) government's politics on terrorism are way more frightening. They wrote a law in order to illegalize political parties which condones or does not condemn terrorism, now a second nationalist political party (AuB) is illegalized because 40% of their members were members of the previously illegalized EH. Now this sunday we have to vote, and the two most strong political parties are joining to get most of the basque country cities as a big part of the voters are 'illegal' and they'll have no votes.
Also, two newspapers have been closed: Egin about three or four years ago (still without any judicial sentence, just by suspicions) and Egunkaria some months ago. No judicial sentence, either.
Sadly, we know a lot about what the terrorism excuse can bring... now, when the second political party (socialdemocrats) says the spanish restaurant blown up in Morocco is a consequence of attacking Iraq, the government denies any relation and accuses them of justifying terrorism...
Of course I'm going to get modded to hell for this, but here goes anyway: Why shouldn't the military have the information needed to protect us against our enemies? In this era, power isn't restricted to iron, but also information. The Gov't has always held a military advantage over the populace. I understand the concerns regarding the database, but how many people really believe that the government is out to get them? Face it, you're just not that important and your life just isn't that interesting. Even with existing technology, if the goverment wanted to spy on you, you're SOL. Remember, an entity's funding determines how well they can track you and get to you. You may be safe against most companies, but the Gov't already has you beaten. Now Mohammad Atta's life they would be extremely interesting. While no one's making any promises, what if such a system had been able to prevent 9-11? What about the next time? Do you really think that the 9-11 attacks will be the last by terrorists on US soil? How many more people will be killed when a biological or dirty bomb goes off? When doing a cost-benefit analysis, there's really no question. In this day and age, where terrorists are our primary threat, we need to be able to locate them quickly. Uncle Sam really isn't going to be looking closely at Joe Smith--he's too boring. There ya go, flame away.
...that having even 99.999% accurate profiles gives 0% protection against 100% determination?
Really, do they not understand they need to root out the *reasons* people oppose the US politics, not just the *symptoms*?
"Terrorists" are not pissed off at the US out of envy of your economic wealth and civilian liberties, and even less so out of religious considerations -- they're pissed off because your wealth and freedom are maintained, in your name, at their expense... In this sense, the only Good Thing is Bush seems to stupid to cover it up, it's now out there or all to see. Or is it?
Curious, anxious, frightened, to see where all this will lead to..
Best/scariest quote from that:
.... I mean, um... what's our rationale today? Dammit, with Ari gone, I can't keep up with the daily White House spin!
"You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest)," said Van Winkle, of the state Justice Department. "You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."
Wow. And here I thought that we went into Iraq to Search For WMDs (tm)... I mean, Free The Iraqis (tm),
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
to subsidize research - historically including automation, jet engines and of course information technology - that may be useful to the private sector.
Yes, everything I say is Chomskyist.
So - what do we have here? We have the pentagon developing an incredibly sophisticated, expensive technology. No private sector entity could ever muster the resources - I mean expertise, not just the finances - to make a comprehensive project like this work. Not even Microsoft (they'd screw it up anyway.) ONLY the defensive department can do it.
I should qualify that - Total Information Awareness could be implemented as open source, if we had motivation to do so. However, that wouldn't serve the purposes of the administration's corporate backers, who's goals do not include clarity and transparency.
Technology much like this already exists in the hands of corporations ("unaccountable private tyrannies," the man can sure turn a phrase) but it is not sophisticated enough for their needs in predicting our behavior - almost everything you do has a commercial component, and would be of interest to someone business, so saying that this is restricted to commercial activities is facetious.
If your primary objection is to the government getting it's hands on the data in the first place, keep in mind that a host of completely unaccountable private organizations - international corporations - already have it. In order for the government to develop such a technology, they need the information in question - so they need new legal powers to get it. The same is not true of corporations, who can and do simply trade the information with eachother.
Once the technology is developed, however, it absolutely will become available as a tool for use by the private sector, who already have the information needed to make it work.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I could go on and on.
Please do, but please read a little more about the American history. Maybe indeed thereare no such things as Native Americans, we all migrated here at one time or another from Eurasia. but the fact remains that one group of migrants committed the crime of genocide on the other. Maybe you had no Gulag, but you had concentration camps even before Lenin managed to say "bolshevism! sounds pretty cool for me!" (American first concentration camps were operating during miners strikes in Colorado in 1903-1904). Maybe you had no guilottine, but you used death penalty on people guilty of nothing else than having subversive political views (like the Haymarket Riot prisoners). Is it REALLY that much of a difference that you tend to fry dissidents on an electric chair rather than cut their heads off?
You are right at one point: It's amazing how fast we forget and take things out of historical context... Otherwise, would the mythos of the "America, land of the free" exist at all?
Right now, TIA and other similar orwellian laws and systems are pushed, but they are not going thru unopposed. Should any of the more extreme ones pass, they would immediately be challenged by civil liberties groups and would probably not survive an encounter with the supreme court. There is still some common sense left in the system.
However... there has been recent rumors that the Bin Laden 'boys' are planning yet another terror attack - on US soil (those car bombs in africa etc are not big enough of a deal).
Should there be a serious terror attack now on US soil, and you could bet your farm that all the people opposing these orwellian measures would be quickly silenced (regardless of the fact that most of these measures have little to do in catching actual terrorists).
As it stands right now, US system is on the brink. It only needs a small push (another few hundred dead in a 'big name' US mainland target clearly linkable to muslim terrorist groups) and we have scary situation in the US. Just like right after 9-11, US passed laws that would never go thru today in the name of 'fighting terror'. They could pass all kinds of loony stuff in the wake of another terror hit.
Hidden elements of the U.S. government have become the most violent force the world has ever known, with a long history of acting in a violent manner and supporting violent dictatorships: The U.S. government has bombed 24 countries in the 58 years since the Second World War. The list below includes only countries bombed, not countries in which the U.S. government was responsible for other violence. The list includes only violence since the Second World War, not the extensive violence before the war. Most U.S. citizens are surprised and skeptical when they see the list, so a few links have been provided to supporting information. For more information, try the Google search engine or see the links below.
There are many sources for this information. For example, see this PBS web page: PBS: A Chronology of U.S. Military Interventions (PBS is the Public Broadcasting System in the U.S.) Also see From Wounded Knee to Afghanistan: A Century of U.S. Military Interventions [zmag.org] and The government of the United States is a consistent opponent of international law. [
I can't speak for the poster to whom you're responding, but I was a registered Democrat during both of Clinton's campaigns (I later became an independent), yet I never voted for him; I just didn't trust him. My mistrust was borne out when his administration tried to push the Clipper chip, among other things, which I found very disturbing and which I told others about. So, no, at least for some of us, government isn't necessarily "just so *great*" when our party's in power; there are some of us (on both the left and right) who don't simply blindly accept whatever our leaders do just because they're ostensibly on our side of the political fence. How about you?
For lots more information about Haymarket, here is an excellent resource from the chicago historical society. A friend of mine wrote the website:
The Dramas of Haymarket
If you want to skip all the historical background and go straight to the bombing, read from Act II.
Experts agree: everything is fine.
I believe that 2+2=5. And I don't want to hear any intolerant crap from you that I'm wrong, you bigot.
You forgot to mention that Palestine wasn't Arab land, it was Turkish land. The vast majority of land in Palestine was owned by wealthy Turkish landowners, from the good ol' Ottoman days. And, of course, Turks are not Arabs. Also, you should remember that Jordan could also be considered East Palestine, since they're all the same ethnic group.
It's also important to note that Israel never signed the NPT, while her neighbors did.
This has to be the most unimaginative and juvenile way of justifying the Bad Things that have been done in America. "But Mommy, Jimmy did so-and-so!"
Particularly pointless was this pedantic little remark about Native Americans: "There are no such things as Native Americans, we all migrated here at one time or another from Eurasia." Allrighty then. I guess it's okay that we slaughtered most of them and stole their land, because they didn't actually exist. I guess if the Chinese decide to take North America from us, it'll be okay, because we're not really Americans, just more-or-less recent immigrants. After all, if there was nothing wrong with dispossesing the redskins, who lived here for millenia, there'd be even less wrong with dispossessing the white folks, who've only been here a tiny fraction of that time.
It's amazing how fast we forget and take things out of historical context...
No shit.
NeoTron wrote:
> Remember that it's the State who will define who an
> "evildoer" is, and what constitutes "evildoing".
Yep, and in the state of California, the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) is now giving terrorism warnings on non-violent peace protests. Dissent now equals terrorism.
> Orwellian surveillance systems will always be a gross
> breach of a citizen's right to privacy,
Say rather "a citizen's right to security", for that is what the right really is. According to the Fourth Ammendment to the US Constitution:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated... "
Now when the government goes on about you giving up your rights for security, you can laugh at them: "You want me to give up my right to be secure for security?!?". And once the people of the US understand they have a constitutionally guaranteed right of security from searches (they understand free speech pretty well), they will tell the government where to take such idiotic ideas as TIA.
> will always be open to abuse by those in power.
Especially by departments of Homeland Security that don't have much to do and want to justify their existence. CATIC for example.
"The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
Japanese version of "Mothra" (1961)
Quoting one article:
Oddly, this has received absolutely no coverage in the US press."dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"