Slashdot Mirror
Fighting Terrorists Through Software, Anonymously?
Silwenae writes "MSNBC has a story online from this week's Newsweek about Jeff Jonas, founder of System Research and Development. SRD's software attempts to verify a person is who he says he is, and then tries to determine who that person may be connected with. Originally used in casinos, the CIA has invested in SRD for use in the war against terrorism. Apparently, Jonas has developed a system that can anonymize the data being analyzed through hashing, so the government can share this information with the private sector to look for hits, without the private sector seeing the specific data."
While real, the issue of terrorism is just the latest scheme to get people to succumb to increased government control and surveillance. I wonder what the effect on the global terrorist threat would be if the US simply withdrew its troops from the 135 countries they are now stationed it (70% of the countries in the world or some such)?
They can't even find Osama Bin Laden (if he really even exists), and they know his name. What good is all this profiling going to do? It smacks of all the same horrible things that all Americans have been taught to rail against since, oh, probably 1945 or so. The world has been through this so many times. Do we need another Dark Ages (TM) to learn what history has already taught us? The victims of past totalitarian regimes are all screaming from their graves--"don't let this happen to you!"