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Total Information Awareness, Disguised And Alive
unassimilatible writes "According to the AP, aspects of the controversial Total Information Awareness DARPA program, officially shut down by the U.S. Congress in September 2003 after a public outcry, seem to have survived. The article reports, 'Some projects from retired Adm. John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness effort were transferred to U.S. intelligence offices, congressional, federal and research officials told The Associated Press. In addition, Congress left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA, that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter's program.'"
in government, shoot for the moon and keep what you can if someone gets a nose on it. This happens all the time and is one of the reasons the federal budget is so large, departments ask for more than they really need and keep what they get.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Isn't this somewhat similar to what the East German secret police did to their citizens during the cold war...
and here I just packed my tinfoil hat, again!
ARDA's mission is to sponsor high-risk high-payoff research designed to leverage leading edge technology in the solution of some of the most critical poblems facing the intelligence community (IC).
High Risk as in 'Public Backlash'?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
am I not even remotely surprised by this announcement ?
Could anyone actually trust a government that passed the PATRIOT Act to actually can TIA ?
We tell them no, then they break it in to a bunch of pieces and do it anyway.
Why do we keep electing these people who keep misrepresenting us to represent us?
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Take a look at the bottom of any of the ARDA pages. See the little webmaster mail link? See the domain it goes to? ardaweb@nsa.gov. I think that since the NSA has gotten a hold of it, there's not much you can do about it . . unless you want to disappear.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
"The whole congressional action looks like a shell game," said Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. "There may be enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical work is continuing."
So most of the projects continue, but under a different name. And this time I am sure they will be much better hidden from the public eye. 1984 anybody?
more about me
That's the government for you. Did you expect anything less?
:)
On a lighter note, I find it endlessly humerous that this psuedo-top secret department, causing all this controversy, that "sponsors high risk, high payoff research designed to produce new technology to address some of the most important and challenging IT problems faced by the intelligence community" has an Upcoming ARDA Calendar of Events!! that it so gleefully links to on its target="_blank">home page.
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
will this (public outcry) also pushes more privacy-invading systems being developed and used in the dark?
now that they knew public doesn't like the idea of such thing, why bother asking in the future? just go ahead and do it.
I don't think treating americans diffrently based on where they are in the world is a good precident to set....
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
Mass protests have done nothing to stop the war in Iraq...what would it take?
So, the bastards think they can keep track of my porn collection, do they?
i am not suprised at all by this article.
i'm definately not voting for bush (not like i did) because the terror color code thing has my little cousin scared of clifford the big red dog because he thinks he's a severe terror threat.
No bad idea ever goes away.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
...is about twenty years overdue for revolution. ... events critical to national security ... such as those of Sept. 11, 2001,"
From the article:
"to help the nation avoid strategic surprise
This kind of reasoning to destroy rights is sick. What does that mean, "such as those"? Where are all these 'terrorists' (sick of THAT word) who wait to waylay me and bugger me bloody?
Ooooh, that's right! The New & Imroved ARDA is protecting me from them. Thanks for that.
BTW. Not believing privacy is my right
MEANS NOTHING TO ME. I'll still claim I have that right, and fight for every inch of it.
_____ "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- Orwell
It just amazes me that the repulicans are all about government staying out of our lives but they produce so much legislation the interferes with our lives. I think that it is time for king George the second to reread the bill of rights or maybe its time for us to fight the revolutionary war again.
I've been searchin for the chord I can't hear Ive been searchin for years Its somewhere inside But its well disguised
Many government agencies have been struggling to pay catch up when it comes to the "Information Revolution". Now a decade after the revolution began some are starting to realize the potential. It's been pretty embarassing to sit at your desk in the CIA and not be able to do a Google Search. I believe that the "total information awareness" program is simply a way to try and rectify this.
The tools are only going to get better, and the more laws and policies that allow the "leakage" of personal information will only make "privacy" a state of mind as opposed to something you actually have. If congress was so concerned about privacy perhaps they would rethink the Patriot Act, or other invasive police policies that have been en vogue for the last decade.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
The government isn't really spying on you, per se. They are taking all the public information out there, and data mining it to potentially flag and catch criminals and terrorists.
The crowd here turn into luddites as soon as technology is used by the government, but I think this is a great use for it. The 9/11 hijackers were in plain view, but because of the different agencies and bureaucracies, they fell through. This could be a tool to find the next 9/11 and I am all for it.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
See what acronyms can do to you. MWEAC, OSIS, MISSI, hell some of their own don't even know what exists or even what they do. Again, I thank John Asscroft and his Patriot Act, all under the gimmick of the pork barrel Department of Homeland Insignificance. Now, obviously this sound trollish but it is not, most people here click by things without looking into things. Sort of like the way stories are read here, a quick glimpse, and that's that.
For those interested in what is going on in government behind the scenes, don't always think people who post the kinds of things I post are all conspiratorial stories aimed at bringing down government through chaos. Hell look at sites like FAS, Cryptome, Arms Control, and the multitude of others. Many people point things out but too many are concerned with menial things such as Janet's boobs, Sex and the Shitty, etc., to notice the rug being pulled from under them. Hell most Americans think CNN and Fox are the holy grail of news. Get out there and read, know what's happening in your country. Check out BBC, Observer, Greg Palast, AntiWar, Chomsky. These people aren't being controlled via advertisers, not political pressure. I write sometimes too kooky assed documents, that some might say aren't worth a pot to piss in. Maybe so, but there is a reason for me rambling on like a madman sometimes. I care about my privacy and liberty. I don't want my friends or family growing up in something out of "Escape from Alcatraz"
MoFscker
I just recently applied for a mortgage loan. The loan guy was happy to share my credit report with me. I looked it over, and found a section I couldn't make sense of. I asked the loan guy what that section meant. He said "That's whether or not you're a terrorist. Congrats, you're not." So as far as the credit reporting agencies go, yes, they track that stuff. Scarier still, that little tidbit, accurate or not, is available to every person capable of pulling a credit rating...
;)
I asked the loan guy what he would do if the report said I was a terrorist... He said "I'd excuse myself to the restroom, get in my car, drive at least five miles away, then call my boss!"
Use these 100,000 measurements of 10 known varibles and outcomes to build a model to predict unkown outcomes for new variables.
DARPA and ARDA's goal of predicting terrorist behavior, or will fail due to a paucity of observed terrorist behavior, an inability to precisely define the objective and an enormous amount of poorly collected, noisy and irrelevant data.
If you believe your friendly neighborhood time traveler...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It is in fact not at all like what the East German secret police (Stasi) did during the cold war. There was no legislative shell game to play because the legislature was a sham. The scope of individual liberty was so small that there was no comparable initiative from Stasi. There was no need to sift through large amounts of data about citizens to find out what they needed to know. Activities were all duly registered, and all records were available to them. Elaborate systems of informants kept tabs on any person of interest.
It's hard to believe that anyone old enough to remember the cold war would say something so ridiculous. American domestic intelligence activities take place in a society where individuals enjoy broad latitude of action outside of state control. Without that context, total information awareness or whatever it has become would not even be a dream in a spies mind.
http://www.ic-arda.org/events/arda_poc.htmlp hone numbers, sorted by project:
Tele
Points of Contact
ARDA Telephone Numbers (301) 688-7092 (comm)
992-3000 (NSTS)
Thrust Managers
Information Exploitation (IE) - (443) 479-8006 / 992-7228
Quantum Information Science (QIS) - (443) 479-8008 / 992-7230
Glodal[SIC-"Global"? ed.] Infosystems Access (GIA) - (443) 479-8009 / 992-7231
Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD) - (443) 479-8010 / 992-7232
Information Assurance (IA) - (443) 479-8012 / 992-7234
Program Managers
Resource Enhancement Program (REP) - (443) 479-8005 / 992-7228
Exploratory Investigations (EI) - (443) 479-8011 / 992-7233
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) - (443) 479-8011 / 992-7233
and from the "Contact Us" page:
If you are interested in learning more about ARDA or have questions, please contact ARDA via:
arda@nsa.gov
301-688-7092
800-276-3747
(fax) 301-688-7410
ARDA
STE 6644
9800 Savage Road
Fort George G. Meade, MD
20755-6530
If you only read a few sentences from this article, read these:
[quote]
Ted Senator, who managed that research for Poindexter, told government contractors that mining data to identify terrorists "is much harder than simply finding needles in a haystack."
"Our task is akin to finding dangerous groups of needles hidden in stacks of needle pieces," he said. "We must track all the needle pieces all of the time."
[/quote]
This would be where the "Total" part of "Toal Information Awareness" comes in.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
Crazy as it sounds with our current culture, history tells us that is exactly what we have to do.
Having democratic elections creates the illusion of that process, but unless the organisations that operate under the government get shuffled as well, then nothing much actually changes. Something tells me that overthrowing the CIA, NSA, FBI, Army, Navy, Airforce, etc, etc isn't going to be easy...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Mark Maybury, MITRE (Chair), maybury@mitre.org
Karen Sparck Jones, University of Cambridge, sparckjones@cl.cam.ac.uk
Ellen Voorhees, NIST, ellen.voorhees@nist.gov
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas at Austin, sanda@cs.utexas.edu
Liz Liddy, University of Syracuse, liddy@syr.edu
John Prange, ARDA, jprange@nsa.gov
ARDA workshops. And for your non Americans, if you think it's limited to us... Have I got news for you! They'll be snooping around the mountains when you come... They'll be snooping around the mountains... they'll be snooping around the mountains...
MoFscker
What is Pointdexter doing running government programs anyway. He and North both ought to be in jail.
5th:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
6th:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Just as it's illegal for the feds to go through every home in america looking for a criminal, it should be (is?) illegal for them to search through private information about me without reasonable cause to suspect me.
Furthermore, the government's paranoia about terrorists will make it illegal to look like a terrorist to this list. If you refuse to give your SS#, you look bad to the list. If you refuse to show ID, you look bad to the list. It doesn't matter that your SS# is supposed to be privately used only for purposes of social security, and it doesn't matter that you can't be forced to show ID unless you are suspected of a crime. What looks bad to the list will become a crime.
I hate this idea because it will imiplicate and punish innocent people for matching the trends of guilty ones. Furthermore, the people said "NO!" to this once, and it's disgusting that our government forces its will over that of the people.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I cannot agree that US government data mining is necessarily ineffective.
US gov TLAs with access to certain types of data alone have phenomenally clean and good data to use for data mining. For starters:
* Phone calls. Forget *contents* of phone calls -- a cop doesn't even need a warrant to get a list of phone calls. Plug all phone calls into a nice big database, and you have an excellent association network -- I can build up a list of all the people you know.
Now, suppose I want to detect flow of causuality. I look for some degree of correlation between a phone call from entity A to entity B and entity B to entity C. If a phone call of the second type follows a phone call of the first type within a day or two more than, say, 25% of the time, there's an interesting link to explore. Maybe entity B is passing on instructions to entity C. I'm not sure what the status of past location data is -- whether a warrant is required for telcos to turn over the data they've logged on your movements. Given a couple of years of accurate movement data, it's probably really interesting when a phone call from entity A to entity B is frequently followed by a physical visit from entity B to entity C.
* Purchasing-related data. Movements can be tracked via ATM withdrawals, credit-card use, phone card use, store purchasing card use. You ever let a friend use your store grocery card? That's a great source of determining who knows who -- a store card associated with two credit cards.
When you get a driver's license, most states fingerprint you (or at least thumbprint). I didn't even know that I *could* opt out of the thumbprint until afterwards.
I agree that mining is probably less useful to find terrorists (frankly, unless a terrorist is just incredibly stupid, he's going to avoid the above), but it *is* useful to track all kinds of other people.
Any person with a cell phone should have no expectation of privacy. They're carrying around a portable tracking device with a microphone that can be turned on remotely. End of story.
May we never see th
When you have a crimial organization the size of the US Government, they will do as they please.
If it fails here, they'll wack it. Sure.
It will pop up there, and if uproar continues, they'll wack it there.
It will pop up over there, under security this time, and if it leaks and there's more uproar, they'll wack it again. With "feeling".
But, once told "no", only criminals will find another way. And the Feds have so very many options.
They'll move it into "private research" inside Lockheed.
Or, they'll bust it up into dozens of subject matter and time compartmentalized graduate projects in their Universities.
Or, or, or...
Seems real terrorists just won't allow themselves to be stopped.
Could anyone actually trust the US government at all.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
"In the language of the Elder Days, 'Arda' signified the World and all that is in it." -- from The Encyclopedia of Arda
I guess it's a suitably ambitious acronym for the project.
For a program like TIA to work, first we have to tell the people that we have chosen not to implement it. No surprise here.
I thought government researchers were killed when their programs got cancelled.
Turns out, they just go get similar jobs in a similar field. Wow.
I lived in West Berlin for over a year oh so long ago. I used to make kindof a study of the wall. Even brought back a piece of it, long before it came down and was sold in pieces in the US like pet rocks. (taking the piece home made kindof a funny story. I was taken off the subway by plainclothes policemen who thought I was going to use it to vandalize something. I switched to English and told them I was an American tourist who was bringing home a souvenir, so they let me go, rock and all)
From what I remember, there was "the wall" - that part that is famous in pictures, with the graffiti and all. Incidently, it was covered/topped with what looked like a continuous cylinder maybe 2 or 3 feet in diameter along the top. I imagine that would have been very hard to get past without special equipment. Behind the wall was the no man's land with a small access road for patrols and the antitank ditch in it. Behind that was a somewhat shorter inner wall as well.
Of course, "the wall" was different in different places. In some places it was partly made up of buildings. Additionally, the western subway went under parts of East Berlin. You could sometimes see guards in the stations in the Eastern part.
It was an interesting study in security. As the wall changed in form due to the changing geography, infrastructure, and so forth, you could see how one who wanted out would attempt to choose the weakest link. One guy built a flat car and drove under the checkpoint gates. Another tightrope walked over the wall (IIRC). And so forth.
Why does this guy get insightful?
I hate people who say that if you don't like it, then you can just leave. No! If you don't like the way something is done, you change how it's done. Grow a pair of balls, man.
Interesting who the research money was going to. Lenat's Cycorp is well-known in the AI community as a black hole into which vast sums of money are poured with no useful results.
On the other hand, Craig Knoblock, whose name was horribly misspelled in the article, is a first class AI researcher. His current work looks like it would be useful outside the context of TIA.
All in all, it looks like the usual story: well-known names in the AI community being supported by money from wherever in the convoluted entrails of the US Federal Govt money comes from. If TIA is defunded, they need new grants to keep working. Don't know that it all means much.
The AP is a powerful media organization, agreed, but Slashdot?? Despite its tremendous power to bring down powerful web servers with one simple post, Slashdot does not reach the vast majority of Americans.
While the program was unified under Poindexter, it was easy to publicise, easy to criticize, and easy to attack. Now that there are 20 different projects run by N different agencies, how are you going to stop it? Since oversight is so much more difficult, this may even end up being more of an invasion of privacy then the original TIA plan.
more about me
I think everyone on Slashdot called this one last July.
Basically, the funding bill that supposedly "killed" TIA only banned funding for the program called "Terrorism Information Awareness." It's a gaping legal loophole that seems to have been written in a piss-poor attempt at reassuring Joe and Jane CNN Viewer that the good government really had no intention to spy on them for subversive activities, no-siree.
I'm not surprised the obvious result is taking place. I am surprised that someone in a newsroom somewhere thought to follow up on the fate of TIA-related research.
Remember: It's not paranoia if they're really watching you.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
The logo of the new project can be seen here.
I used to work for TIA, as part of a software contractor. If I named the contractor, it would mean little to you, but we were an integral and successful part of Poindexter's plans - I was supposed to meet the man myself and ended up meeting all his direct reports (he was busy at the last minute). We were part of a larger software effort invovling information databases. I made quite a good living.
I ended up in the job, as is always the way, by drifting from one task to another inside the contractor until I ended up doing anti-terrorist work - a classic "slippery slope".
I did the only honest thing I felt I could - I quit. Of course, I'm not going to claim I was any sort of hero. Because I didn't like why I was working, I didn't like my job, and as a software programmer, it wasn't too hard to find another job. But, I did quit a good job for essentially political reasons.
I mention this for 2 reasons: 1) If people refused to do the work, refused to take the jobs, the program would never succeed (I know it's easy to say - I have no kids to feed - but still, it's true). Hell, people fled the country to avoid fighting in Vietnam. 2) It was common knowledge that there was little risk in having TIA go away - everything would stay the same (and has, at my old company). 3) What we were doing was not secret - never was. But nobody knew anyway, and the people running the show liked it that way. Security through obscurity.
Or does the fact that the intelligence agencies aren't able to even analyze the massive flow of info they have not bother anyone?
Certainly we don't need a repeat of past events. What's the point of saying, "no don't look, no don't look, no don't look, no don't look", and then when the attack comes, scream, "why weren't you looking???"
...well, fucking, DUH.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
The greatest tradgity is that people have been convinced that a vote for a third party is a wasted vote. Don't fall for it.
Did you notice what happened in the 2000 election? In New Hampshire and Florida, about 3% of the votes went to Ralph Nader. Polls showed that the majority of those votes, had Nader not been there, would have gone to Gore.
If a majority of those who voted for Nader in 2000 in either of those states had voted for Gore instead, he would have had a very clear majority and become our president.
So I suppose that sometimes, yeah, votes for a third-party candidate can make a difference. They can achieve exactly the opposite of what you want. People voted for Nader because he was for the environment, basically. And...um...what has Bush done for the environment lately? (Note, for, not to)
Voting for a third-party candidate is throwing your vote away in the current political-economic climate. Someday, I think there will be third-party candidates who can stand a chance, but not until there's real, serious campaign finance reform.
By this I mean that what I hope to see is no election can be funded, at all, by private money. Everyone gets the same amount, from the government (yes, obviously, it means more taxes. Deal. We pay very low taxes compared to the rest of the Western world).
But, to get a little more back on topic, unless you can raise significantly more than any of the other candidates and get serious name recognition, you don't stand a chance as a third-party candidate these days. So voting for a third-party candidate is throwing your vote away. Vote Democrat, at least they say they want campaign finance reform, and have a much better record of standing up for what they believe in (no, I don't have specific examples. Find your own).
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
fear and terror makes money --it funds the military industrial complex and helps slow growth of other countries by allowing us to continue destabilizing them economically and politically. Cuba anyone? This is a control mechanism that will be used to reduce citizens rights and dissent in the US, not just to hunt terrorists. and it will perpetuate the OH NO the TERROR ALERT WENT UP! paranoia because all it will find is false positives anyway. it's about as useless as stoping cars at an airport to make sure they dont have explosives. hello, we'd hit a school, tyvm.
All your preview button are belong to Hello Kitty.
Bad scary naming (TIA, Total Information Awareness!? come on) and bad marketing aren't going to stop them. They'll rename it to sound beneficials and be much more covert about implementing it. But they still will.
Too much at once (Patriot II) is also scary. So they implement all the little bits of Patriot II over time, until it is eventually all done. Once it's done it'll be much harder to roll it back.
The story of boiling a frog once again comes to mind: stick the frog in boiling water and he jumps out; you lose your dinner. Put the frog in warm water and gradually heat it to boiling -- he stays in and eventually gets cooked.
We are the frogs.
the only thing you *can* do is generalize...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I really don't appreciate this.
Although September 11th was scary, and a wake-up call (to whom, I'll let you decide), you certainly have taken the ball and run with it.
From control of the media, to your obvious relationships with big business, you're feeling pretty good right now, I'll bet. Hell, you barely try and hide controversial projects now; really who's going to stop you? Voter turnout is a joke, and even if people showed up, there's not really a guarrantee that the results haven't been tampered with.
The 'war on terror' is just amazing. So much can be rationalized for 'safety's sake'. Who's un-american this week? Who's a potential threat? Who stands against freedom?
I'm sure you will provide the answers to these questions from your bully pulpit, from newspapers and television that run whatever is put in front of them.
Frankly, terrorists don't scare me. You do.
That's right, my very own government. You've declared war. Not on terror, but on privacy, civil and human rights, and freedom.
Washington? Are you listening? When did rampant wiretapping, invading library records and putting gag orders on librarians, installing keyloggers on our computers, and treating every citizen like a criminal become the definition of freedom?
I'd sure like an answer, Washington, because it sounds like you have it in for me, as well as everyone else who lives here - in the most free nation on earth. For now.
Sincerely,
teamhasnoi
What the hell is that supposed to mean? May I remind you that the original purpose of the federal government was primarily to resolve disputes among the states? There was no individual income tax, and the federal budget primarily consisted only of the money required to pay Congressmen's salaries. These days the federal government consumes about 40% of the GNP and is tantamount to an oligarchy. Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution grants Congress only 19 specific powers, and none of them (except for counterfeiting) permits the federal government to pass laws regulating the conduct of individual citizens. Such laws were only within the purview of the individual states.
Inasmuch as one of the primary purposes of the government is the defense of the country, the present 18% budget expenditure on defense is probably justified, but other than that all the myriad entitlement programs, federal government agencies, etc., could and should be eliminated, resulting in a federal government that is minuscule compared to it's present ponderous and burdensome size.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
And if you want to get into an argument about how the US has greater constitutional freedoms than any other country, let's have it.
You remind me of a typical lib. - Challenge his stand on national security, and he responds, "don't question my patriotism." Uh, when did I do that, knucklehead?
I wish people, especially people responsible for the spending of billions of our tax dollars would get their ideas from sources more credible than CSI or The Six Million Dollar Man...
Talk to the leadership in the Intelligence Technology, and they'll tell you, finding bad guys is hard enough. Trying to sift though mountains of pepper hoping to find the one fly speck, is just insane. One "Intelligence Researcher" refered to the idea of watching every single American for signs of terrorist affiliation is like "Looking for a needle in a haystack of haystacks..." This will ultimately make it much harder to find the real bad guys, waste precious human and financial resources on fantasy tech that does not exist (and won't for some time to come), and in the end... innocent lives continue to hang in the balance.
I have a close friend who during Pappa Bush's administration, worked at Lockheed. He worked on debunking "Brilliant Pebbles" the next incarnation of "Smart Rocks", intelligent projectiles in space designed to hunt down and elliminate the threat of ICBMs to America (all part of the Star Wars Initiative.) He explained that the hardware to make this possible wouldn't exist until some time after 2010, and that even when that hurdle was cleared, there was no way to control the pebbles or have them communicate, that couldn't be jammed by EMP or radiation. In short, it was a doomed idea, and no amount of sexy or comic book fantasizing by Pentagon hawks was going to make this dog hunt. It took years and millions of dollars to finally convince these guys.. this was a bad idea. God only knows what we'll have to do, to get the Dexterites to wise up in a sane timeframe.
This is of course above and beyond the simple gutting of the entire philosophy of our particular form of government. That being;
Government should be transparent, and citizens should have operational privacy.
Somehow, our executive seems to believe the opposite, and it's all too clear that an opaque executive can simple be equated to one who is interested in paving his agenda all over the citizenry and the landscape, rule of law be damned.
Genda
-- Thems that trade a bit of liberty for a bit of security...
Sorry for this offtopic rant, but statements like these really piss me off:
Jeez. Do you know how ignorant that paragraph makes you seem? You need the basic rights like due process and a fair trial to actually establish for a fact that these people are "combatant terrorists".
They may be, but there is no fscking way of knowing, unless they are given the rights, which has been explicitly been taken away from them. How complicated is that to understand?!?
Ofcourse, G. W. Bush haven't understood this at all, but this should be no surprise. I quote: "the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people". How does he know?
But let's be consistent in our reasoning at least. Since murder is also a sever crime, I suggest we remove all security that the law provides for fair trials, if the poeple are accused for murder. After all they are murderers and don't deserve any legal protection, now do they?
Last I checked, some of these "combatant terrorists" held which were release after only 18 months, was found to be a taxi-driver and his ride. I think you should consider the possibility that the people giving out "terrorists", has aproximately the same credability as those informing the US about Iraqi WMD.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
The US Government are not stupid - they go along with DARPA to get a surveillance society.
.......
They want to keep an eye on you all.
This is NOT about terrorism.
I have posted on this topic many times.
Extract:
Ask Security Services in the US, UK, Indonesia (Bali) or anywhere for that matter, to deny this:
Internet surveillance, using Echelon, Carnivore or back doors in encryption, will not stop terrorists communicating by other means - most especially face to face or personal courier.
Terrorists will have to do that, or they will be caught.
The authorities try make everything they say sound perfectly reasonable.
e.g. Officials from US Defence Department agency have said that they want, "the same level of accountability in cyberspace that we now have in the physical world".
Do government currently keep records of everything that you touch in the physical world to analyse?
No they do not - So then, is that the same level of accountability?
More at previous post.
Does anyone else find that Admirals name highly amusing. Maybe its just me.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
As someone else pointed out in some other slashdot/k5-discussion (I've googled and looked, but I can't find a link), the people who are really in power are not elected at all.
The president may be the one who "makes" the decissions, but he has advisors and generally a big staff. There are also those who are head of variuos goverment agencies, who are largely influencial.
When you look upon us politics in general, you will find that alot of what the president is apparently doing, really is the work of someone who has been sitting in the administration for 10, 20, maybe 30 years.
The people with real power are not elected. That's why these things seem to happen regardless.
At least that's what I claim, for what that's worth.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
That's right. Two.
One on each hand.
-FL
It's pretty much a given, I'd say. When they finally crawl out and start taking people away for muttering seditious 'thought-crime' anti-government stuff, I'll probably be hauled off and killed or humiliated or whatever along with the rest of them.
Fine, and to hell with 'em.
What's a painful, miserable death anyway? You have to go somehow. A red-hot fire-poker shoved somewhere indecent can't be any worse than extended bowl cancer or getting hit by a truck.
I might even be reduced to fear and groveling and begging and all that other stuff which is almost a certainty when torture is involved. Doesn't mean they win, though.
Anybody working on the Dark Side is beneath contempt. You are losers and you will fade forgotten from the eye of the Universe. Nothing but a speed bump; a challenge. --That and I'll fight you every last step of the way. I'll point out your spineless, dark-side, un-loveable qualities until you finally rip my tongue out in pathetic rage. And then my eyes will follow you with disdain until you jab those out as well.
And when I come back, I'll be the clear-eyed kid next door who you secretly both love and despise and wish would validate your existence by letting you tag along. And on our ever diverging paths we will go until you are nothing but a dream in the past.
Souls develop, and the decisions you make today are who you become tomorrow. In which direction are you working?
-FL "The biggest crime was convincing everybody that this life is all there is."
Very true.
Unfortunately, and you probably realize this, the watchers are not looking for terrorists.
Fear = Power, and Power = Control; The Power to control the things which they Fear.
An ever tightening circle.
IBM supplied Hitler with the punch card machine technology which made it possible for the Nazi regime to track down through blood relations all the Jews which were sent to camps for destruction.
Terrorists? Puh-lease.
-FL
You obviously missed my point entirely.
My question was how would you determine with absolute certainty that someone is guilty of a crime, being it under costitutional protection or not, if there is no due process?
Would you except being stuck at Guantanamo for years without an attorney, simply because someone named you as a "illegal combatant"? May I ask you, as you may clarify this, illegal according to whom?
I'll claim with great prejudice, "illegal combatant" is simply a political rethoric, a rethorical rewrite to avoid difficult questions. Obviously works on Americans though.
You obviously take it for granted that these people are, oh whatever, say "illegal combatants" or terrorists, name your favorite. How can you know this with certainty? So far there has been only claims, captures, and complete ignorance of basic human-rights.
Which really is no good method of determining guilt. And is this kind of treatment really worthy of a modern democracy?
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I don't object to the researchers being kept on. From what I have seen, the Information Awareness office that was shut down did some good work. We need 'information awareness', we need ways to automate looking through all the crap out there to find out what is useful and what isn't. The problem seems to be that some of these people seem willing to do anything to get that information, and I don't mean the researchers, I mean the spooks and the right wingers.
The irony is that this tool would be much more useful and effective if they knew which way to point it. Rather than blanketing every bit of data everywhere, why not send in spies, get a vague idea who may be involved and then focus on that group rather than wasting resources everywhere. Go from 6 billion targets to 1 million or so and your odds go way up. It may be old fashioned, but that method got us through the Cold War and I don't understand why it can't work for the 'War on Terror'(which is a misnomer but I won't get into that). We need decent human intelligence. Without decent human intelligence all of these fancy computers will be next to useless, which is our current predicament. Information is useless without knowledge.
And as for the people who are getting all freaked out by the government, especially on this geeky forum, it is the powermongers/wannabe dictators that should be afraid of us. Whenever I imagine a worst case scenario, where fascists take over, I imagine what I would do to fight back. Theoretically, I know how to shut the whole system down: communications, telephone, internet, power, transportation et cetera. Knowledge is power. But I believe that most of the people who run the national security apparatus are patriots who believe in liberty. I find it difficult to believe they would stoop to dictatorship. But if they do go too far, I'm not afraid of them, and they had better fear me. If anyone truly believs our liberty is being undermined, it is their duty to stand up and fight...anyone???