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What's Your Terrorism Quotient?
unassimilatible writes "From the Department of Pre-Crime, the AP reports: before helping to launch the criminal information project known as Matrix (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange), a database contractor gave U.S. and Florida authorities the names of 120,000 people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists - sparking some investigations and arrests. The 'high terrorism factor' scoring system also became a key selling point for the involvement of the database company, Seisint Inc., in the Matrix project. According to Seisint's presentation, dated January 2003 and marked confidential, the 120,000 names with the highest scores were given to the INS, FBI, Secret Service and Florida state police. Seisint and the law enforcement officials who oversee Matrix insist that the terrorism scoring system ultimately was kept out of the project, largely because of privacy concerns."
I'd be more interested to know how many people were entered into the system... isn't that pertinent here? I mean, if they only put in 120,000 and they all came back as terrorists, something's probably wrong. Is Osama in that list? Did it pick up anyone we already knew was a terrorist? Just hearing a number as high as 120,000 isn't surprising without more information about the number. Yes, I could RTFA, but with a summary that long, I would have expected at least the number polled to be in there.
stuff |
Most people care about the latest reality tv show. A great many of my Wife's co-workers didn't know about the Abu Ghraib photos, think we found WMDs and that 'about 100 or so' soldiers have died in Iraq.
Yes, a large majority of people are either that dense or simply don't care.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Google this: /. ever met a "terrorist"?
1) This company was started by a drug running felon with ties to the Bush's
2) Read the Contract between Seisint and the Florida Goverment with the MATRIX
3) This company is very, very late with their software project - using terrorism as means to drag it out.
4) 120,000 terrorists in the US? C'mon! Has ANYONE on
5) 3.2 billion dollars a year goes toward "cyber security".
After reading all this, I get soooo disgusted.. I mean, this is SICK!!! How much money is wasted? How the hell do I get a piece of terrorist pie?! Millions of dollars have been lost and never gone to me.
How can the open source community get some of this cash cow? How about a sourceforge project Ivory Tower (the irony of the name would be great)?
-Foo
As someone raised muslim, with a muslim name ( and one that happens to correspond to that of an at-large chechen terrorist ) I'll wager it's time to get out of this country.
You know, that makes me sad. I'm American, I was born here, so were my parents. My father's been in trouble with the law, long ago, and happens to have the #1 most common Muslim name. Regardless, he, like me, loves this country.
I'm no longer practicing ( read: vehement Atheist ) but if all it takes is having a troublesome name, well, it seems then the tide has finally turned. Perhaps this will be America's crystal night?
I'm at a loss for words.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
>> people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists
Come again? How does one define an activity that makes you statistically a terrorist?
Is it by the car they drive?
Is it by the job they have?
Is it by their nationality?
Is it by their age?
Is it by their house?
Is it by anything bar the obvious ones, such as actively supporting terrorist activities?
Probably not. They probably picked at almost random 120,000 people and defined them as a 'likelihood of being terrorists'.
The question is who gets to make that choice? To me, it seems that the person(s) who make the choice could be as much of a terrorist as your average next door Jones, yet because they make the choices, they call the shots; they will never be featured in that list.
I would love to know how many of the 120,000 people were -NOT- charged with terrorist activities; i doubt that even 1% of them were arrested with enough evidence to prove it. However, given the current state of the laws, that doesn't matter now, does it?
Why seed the data? Why not let the information be collected the way it's intended, and then compile a list from it? Ok, this system might be rather like the 'big brother' we are all fearing, but currently, most major supermarkets track what you buy almost without you noticing, so its not like this information will be collected obtrusively.
Maybe its time someone out there took a step back and looked at the system they have just partaken in creating, and they just might, possibly, see it as something that shouldn't be.
Someone needs to look at this before the next 'red-ball' has your name on it, because by then, it's too late.
NeoThermic
P.S, is it me, or have they forgotten how to make an acronym? How does one get from Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange to Matrix? To me that makes 'MATIE'...
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
It gets worse. Apparently America's claim to the moral high ground in Iraq is now 'Yes, but Saddam did even worse things in that prison!'
I'm just hearing Squealer say 'Surely you do not want Jones to come back?'
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You know, I don't so much mind the cameras per se. What pisses me off no end is what the police do with the film.
No, it's not Big Brother. Or rather, it is - not in the Orwell sense, but the fucking Channel 4 sense. The police sell the film to TV companies to put together trash TV about drunks making fools of themselves.
If I come out of a pub pissed and throw up into the gutter, I don't mind some copper watching on the security camera. He's a copper - he sees loads of people throw up in gutters. But if the cops decide to sell the footage of me throwing up into a gutter, and it gets on TV, and people who know me, for instance maybe my boss or my dear old grandmother...
Embarrassing at the very least. The fuck are they playing at, selling the footage for entertainment?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. " This to me says seperation of church and state. "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." The right to privacy. While the constitution may not be explicit in it's definition of either of these two topics, the tradition of common law, going back to England, gives judges the power to define the law and constitution by creating precedence through judicial decisions.
Depends on the terrorists. In the middle east it's oil, diamonds and some heroin. In South America for at least the FARC it's the greatly over inflated value of drugs caused by prohibition.
If we end the WoD (war on drugs) by legalizing marijuana and making all other drugs available for prescription for maintance (with the execption of antibiotics) the price of drugs would bottom out. Heroin could be purchased from CVS for $5.00 a dose instead $100 off the street. Lower prices means the end of drugs partly funding bad things. The bonus would be a dramatic drop in property crimes. A few years ago in Bern, Switzerland they tried selling heroin directly to addicts for ~$4.50 per dose. Property crimes dropped by 60%.
Without prohibition illegal drugs would cost 100th of their current price and would save the US over 15 billion dollars every year in law enforcement and prison costs. At least an extra 1 billion dollars a year would be made from the taxation of marijuana. BTW, studies in the Netherlands showed that drug use did not increase with an easing supply.
The economic forces of prohibition fund a lot of bad things including terrorism.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
Please explain to me how the handful of rusty or unlabelled shells (many of which had leaked their contents 10+ years earlier) we've found in Iraq represents the "Vast stockpile" of banned weapons we were led to believe existed in Iraq? A stockpile, we were told, that was so vast as to allow field commanders to deploy them on "40-minutes notice." If this was true, please explain why none of the ammo caches and dumps we found during the war contained any WMD?
Please also explain to me how the handful of rusty and/or unlabelled (mostly useless) shells we've found represents an immediate threat to the security of the United States?
Please also explain how before the war, Bushie was warning us about nuclear armageddon caused by Saddam Hussein, yet we've found no evidence of an advanced nuclear weapons program. They did possess a stolen, 50-year old Chinese design for a bomb, but they weren't anywhere near the point of being able to fabricate a weapon.
Also, our (just as oppressive) ally Pervez Musharraf actually has several nuclear devices at his disposal. When will we be invading Pakistan? Or is continuity no longer part of the "Bush plan"?
Who did what now?
The only terrorist attacks that come to my mind that happened in America somewhat recently are the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing. For a grand total of 19 terrorists. And this list brings up a 120,000 potential terrorists.
I would fucking hate to be on that list. These are going to be the people that can't fly because they're blacklisted, that can't get government jobs because they're blacklisted, or who knows, can't take out a mortgage because they're blacklisted. Even though the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor that they aren't a terrorist.
And what exactly do you have to do to get on this list? I mean you could say that Mr. McVeagh (sp?), the only American out of the aforementioned 19 terrorists, was an extremist libertarian...Do we suspect all of the libertarians? Its a sad time for a once free country when you seriosly have to consider what you register [to vote] as because you might end up on some list because even if you're peaceful they're not going to know that.
--HC
So I'm jump'n up and down screaming show me the money.
What happens to you if someone else has a similar name? From this article on the ACLU's No Fly List lawsuit:
Or from this article from 2003:"This week 18 men named David Nelson, all residents of Oregon, confirmed they have been repeatedly delayed at airport counters and security checkpoints in the last year or so."
"Remember Ozzie and Harriet's son, David Nelson? "I got stopped at the John Wayne Airport" in Orange County, Calif., he said by phone from Los Angeles this week. "Two police officers knew who I was and tried to explain to the guy behind the security desk. It didn't faze him at all." Even as another officer was saying he had once met David's mother, Harriet, David was being instructed to remove his shoes, he says. "I asked, 'Does the guy on the list have a middle name of Ozzie?' He said, 'It just says David Nelson.' "
According to the terrorist's interpretation of islamic law it is their duty to attack the US and all other non islamic states. They believe they are instructed to convert or kill all non islamic people. Those are your choices, join islam or die. This is not an rare interpretation of islamic law.
There have been many "terrorists" throughout the ages. These Islamic fundamentalists aren't the first ones. So are you saying that USA should just carry out imperialism and attempt to take over huge chunks of the world just because of this problem?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places