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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."
What more innocent times were these, exactly?
What they are trying to do is make us believe that this is a feature, and not a bug? Are members of our government actually human? Or is this a ploy to steal all of our freedoms right out from under us. Next thing I know I'll be sitting alone in my room afraid to say anything because they might be listening. My TV will always be on because there will be no way to ever turn it off, and my name will be changed to something lame like Winston.
but it will only be used against evildoers
You don't say. Whom did they intend to use it against if congress hadn't stopped them? Anyone who changes sides because of an argument like that deserves to be deported to a police state where, of course, all laws are for the good of the people, too.
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?
oh yeah, that whole arresting thing is going out the window too. It's become unfashionable to arrest people, now you just throw them in a cell forever in connection with another case, one which you are not required to mention.
The phrase, "May you live in interesting times" never sounded so scary...
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if, behind the scenes, DARPA says something like "well, members of Congress will, of course, be exempt!", at which point Congress will immediately approve it.
I really wish, in this race to the bottom, some country would get there first in time to allow other countries to finally figure out that shit like this is really a very bad thing. But it looks to me like all of the countries are more or less operating in lockstep with each other, so they'll all hit bottom at about the same time.
Still think I'm full of shit when I say that the world is going to turn itself into a police state and that the end result will be a stable form of government capable of lasting thousands of years?
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
An editorial in today's NY Times notes that one of the ways the TIA will track people is by their walk. Observantly, Dowd parallels this to Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks. Apparently, this method of detection can be overridden by wearing a long coat.
I feel safer already.
"it's the State who will define who an "evildoer""
No need. The State can define a new term 'Potnetial Terrorist' and we'd all be included - in effect it becomes Total Info Awareness. Sometime back I posted a series of definitions that could be used:
Potential Terrorist - All of us.
Kinetic terrorist - Mobile phone users.
Intellectual terrorists - Reverse-engineers
Organised potential terrorists - Linux User Groups
e-terrorists - internet users
and so on... No need to be bashful before ordering surveillance on all and sundry.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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
Yeah, what kind of country would store masses of weapons and threaten foreign nations with violence while imposing a police-state style military control on its own citizens?
Lucky we're nothing like those bastard Iraqis.
By reading this comment, you immediately waive any and all rights regarding 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
Also remember that the State once considered Martin Luther King, Jr. an "evildoer".
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
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
You could also add to that list 'suspected terrorist'.
When the Patriot Act was enacted after Sept 11, 2001, it included a provision to allow US companies to discontinue services with a suspected terrorist. At my company, a large anonymous insurance company, we are being asked (in lieu of $10,000,000 fines) to compare every claimant, vendor, and any name we come across to a database of suspected terrorists provided by the Treasury Department.
If the name matches, we are to withhold payment of the claim until we mail a form to the Treasury Dept, and they investigate the suspected terrorist.
So, if a person is injured on the job, is out of work, and wants to collect workers compensation from his employer's insurance company, he wont be able to if he has the same name as someone on the Treasury Dept's list. So, he wont be able to work because he's injured, and he wont be able to collect any insurance. Where's he going to get money to live on while the Treasury dept investigates?
Needless to say, I was appauled that we had to program these features into our claim system.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb