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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'm 24 years old. I don't want to go through the next 50 years of my life living in an international air of worry and uncertainty. I don't want to live in a permanent state of fear, generated by a megalomaniacal American government taking advantage of the majority low IQ populous' capacity for being brainwashed.
I don't want to live like Israel, fighting militant Muslims round every corner. The problem of Muslim extremists exists and needs to be dealt with, not encouraged by invading innocent countries and waging war on people who have done nothing to deserve it. I want my children to grow up in a world free from military oppression and I want a government that understands that the wars of the future are guerrilla ones which can never be won, even if they are waged for noble purposes (which theirs never are).
The world is fu*cked up enough as it is. The food chain has been poisoned so badly the average human is full of chemicals normally found in plastics and toxic waste. I'm sick of global warning and environmental damage to the planet and the fact the all this time the greenies were right. I'm sick of America being the biggest wilful contributor to the pollution of the planet.
I'm sick of an American school system that produces children who are brought up to believe that America IS the world and anything that goes on outside is irrelevant. Children so stupid they think America invented the Internet, computer, motor car, light bulb, telephone etc ad infinitum....
The Internet or it's successor is the future of entertainment and I'm sick of stupid low IQ, ignorant Americans infecting every corner of it with their insular, jingoistic mindsets, their whiny voices and manifestations of their low self esteem driven by the fact that despite it being their turn as the world's super power, no one actually takes them seriously or gives them the respect that the British or the Ancient Greeks got because a superpower best known for producing mass produced crap is never going to get the respect that one who gave the world Shakespeare, culture, philosophy or mathematics will get.
I'm sick of hypocrisy and two facedness. I'm sick of Gangsta Rap and hamburgers, Political Correctness and TV programmes that begin with 'When' and end in 'go bad and attack people'. I'm sick of reality TV and I'm sick of news programmes that are more censored than accurate. I'm sick of tokens, token minorities, token universities, token degrees, token attempts at the truth, tokens. I'm sick of fat people, ugly people, stupid people, gay people, coloured people, female people, whiny people all complaining they don't have the opportunities in life they would like and it must be someone else's fault. I'm sick of women that act like men and femininity being a crime, unless you're a man in which case you're a new man which nobody ever wanted because there was nothing wrong with the old one. I'm sick of people falling over and suing the ground and people watching nipples and suing the TV and I'm sick of coffee cups with 'don't pour over yourself, you may get burnt' on the side to try and counter this.
I'm sick of stupid Americans who don't know the difference between patriotism and jingoism and who think flag waving should be an Olympic event. I'm sick of Americans who cry that people hate them or are jealous of them or who are anti them because someone dares to point out that the America they've been programmed to believe in from birth bears no relation to the one that exists in real life.
Minority Report meets the Matrix.
>>Seisint Inc., is a Boca Raton, Fla., company founded by a millionaire, Hank Asher, who stepped down from its board of directors last year after revelations of past ties to drug smugglers.
Anyone care to guess one of the main sources of terrorist income?
Judging by the title, I thought the article was going to tell us how to find out our score.
"There is a 20% likelyhood of you blowing up a building this year. Have a nice day."
who can refer to the USA as "The Land of the Free" while keeping a straight face.
OSDN announced today that the Slashdot Karma system will be integrated with the Terrorist Quotient database.
Unknown host pong.
sweet f'ing christ. do people not see similarities to the Red Scare or McCarthyism? Are people really so dense?
save me jeebus.
Bomb, gas, crash, Afghanistan, airplane, fire, biowarfare, sarin, nuclear, Muqtada Al-Sadr, barbarism, CIA, Al-Qaida, terrorist, seize, drugs, fertilizer, kill, plot, chemical, RPG, bin Laden, canister, Iraq, plague, sniper, sleeper cell, C4, guerilla, Barbara Streisand
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
yes, because there are 120,000 terrorists. And they've been identified by software. we should arrest them.
I think that the ACLU is not worried about arresting terrorists... i think that they're generally for it. I think they're more worried about the ratio of actual terrorists to non-terrorists in our investigations being way, way, way to low.
~dijjnn
"But the ACLU is still, predictably, concerned."
As they should be.
120,000 people could be arrested this week-simply for being in a database. I think that 9/11 has simply turned our government against anyone who might come within a hundred miles of overthrowing it-even it's own citizens. Listen to Fear Factory's "Obsolete" and look for the not-too far off future.
Think: this kind of thing, if your "quotient" was too high, could conceiveably prevent you from getting a job, or maybe a loan. I don't think this helps everyone. It's all a product of feelings of racism and vengeance.
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
This is ridiculous. They don't have a 'likely to commit a murder' database.. or a 'likely to rape young women' database.. unless those people have already committed crimes. Now, we can be likely to commit a crime yet still be someone that has never commited a crime.
I'm sick of what the government has done in the spirit of 'fighting terrorism.' Terror is the least of my worries. Ya, 9/11 was horrible.. but it isn't worth giving up our way of life to prevent. I'm more likely to be struck by lighting while being bitten by a shark than to die from an act of terror.
These 'preventative' databases are stupid. American Citizens should not be subject to a 'likely to commit terror' database without ever having done something wrong. Some of the most patriotic people are also the most criticizing of the US.. Should they be on the database?
If there are 120,000 people on the list, shouldn't there have been more acts of terrorism in the US?
IMO, there's bigger problems on which to focus. Why fix the windshield wipers when the brakes aren't working?
--- We need more Ron Paul!
The ACLU is the only organization that ever has the balls to look at what the Federal Government is doing and make a stand against the overarching, draconian measures that many government officials would *love* to see happen. Guess what? The Federal Government wants to control your actions as much as possible, not only so that you are not a threat against Americans, but more so that you are not a threat against them.
Protecting us from random acts of terror is about as possible as landing a 747 on the Brooklyn Bridge. We're too open, too easy, too soft. Guess what? I LIKE IT THAT WAY.
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither".
Did you see the latest FBI Suidice Bomber Warnings sent out today? Here's a pointer from the alert: Be on the lookout for people with clenched fists!!
Living in the United States used to be about living out a free existence with minimal government intervention. In the last few years we have become an Orwellian society where you are stamped with a number and contstantly tracked by the government for 'threat status'. Your primary purpose is to receive advertising, consume products, and pay the government a share of it all.
I have bad news for some: the War on Terror is not a war anyone could win, and even fighting it for a thousand years would not end the cycle of violence that perpetuates it. I wonder how many young Iraqi children are thinking about their bombed out homes and dead parents and swearing vengeance on the United States someday. Those will be the next generation of people who fly planes into our skyscrapers.
They understand that they're going to sometimes be defending unpopular positions and people. They defend the rights of white supremacists to march in public, for example. They've also defended Rush Limbaugh against what they view as intrusive attempts by the police to get at his medical records and show that he was "doctor shopping" to feed his addiction. They're making those choices consciously, according to principles which they state conspicuously.
You, meanwhile, don't seem to be doing anything more than bitch for reasons you haven't thought through.
First off: when, exactly, has the ACLU complained that not enough is being done to fight terrorism? Hello? Anyone home? Or were you just confusing "liberals" or "Democrats" with the ACLU?
And more to the point: "Potential terrorists"? When you start using a term like that, perhaps you'd like to devote some thought to it. Because the FBI has, in the past, regarded people like Martin Luther King, Jr. as a "potential terrorist." Because, you know, that let them bug his hotel rooms and accumulate evidence that he wasn't faithful to his wife, which put some nice blackmail material in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover.
The ACLU tries to protect American citizens from the abusive use of power. You, meanwhile, resent them for 'getting in the way.' What does that say about you, exactly? Maybe you want to think that through rather than sleepwalking through your life vaguely angry at those pesky liberals.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I'm sorry, I'm not cleared to know that. If I could tell you, I'd have to kill me.
"Seriously though, do you not expect the agency reponsible for anti-terrorism efforts to actually do its job well?"
How is picking 120,000 people as potential terrorists based on some arbitrary algorithm "doing its job well"? Do you really think there are 120,000 terrorists in America? Do you really think that the government will do better to harass 120,000 people, most of whom are not terrorists, than to, say, infiltrate terrorist groups and find out who really, actually, is a terrorist?
"If this could have stopped those planes from killing thousands of civilians, people would be screaming in outrage about how we didn't use it when we should have"
Once the terrorists know how the system works they can easily avoid being spotted: and the government will be too busy chasing those 120,000 non-terrorists to do anything about the real ones. This is the most basic and obvious flaw of any such arbitrary flagging scheme... anyone who knows the algorithm knows how _not_ to get flagged.
here
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Personally, I would lean toward having false positives. You can always run the results against other databases and find better/best matches. With some additional fact-checking implementation, I think they could rule out some false positives. It may be horribly inconvenient to be hassled with an investigation, but if people do their jobs (with gov't folks, sometimes that's all you can hope for!) then clearing your name shouldn't be too bad.
So much for Innocent until Proven Guilty.
You're making a huge assumption about "people doing their jobs". Just plain laziness, quotas, as well as simply trying to ruin someone for political reasons will all enter into this.
> I don't want to live like Israel, fighting militant Muslims round every corner.
>The problem of Muslim extremists exists and needs to be dealt with, not encouraged by invading innocent countries and waging war on people
>who have done nothing to deserve it. I want my children to grow up in a world free from military
>oppression and I want a government that understands that the wars of the future are
>guerrilla ones which can never be won, even if they are waged for noble purposes (which theirs
>never are).
You just completely contradicted yourself in the same paragraph. You don't want the threat, but you don't want to do anything about it, and you want your children to grow up in a militarized world, and you want your government to default to surrender because it can't allow itself to fight guerrilla tactics because somehow they are impossible to employ in the persuit of victory? After such blatant and simple to unravel contradiction, where you are speaking crosswise to yourself without pausing to take a breath, why should we listen to anything else you have to say?
I believe his logic can best be explained as:
a)"When you poked the wasp nest you got stung"
b)"Poking the bee nest just to get back at the wasps will only make things worse"
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
I'm a UK citizen, living (with a Green Card, happily married) in the USA. Prior to 9/11, I could travel easily within the country - rarely stopped, security were somewhat courteous, and life was easy. Since 9/11, I can't make it through a single airport without being taken aside for a full search! Last time, I asked why - and was told that I'm in a database of likely travel threats. The only connection I have to terrorism is that I authored my Master's thesis (back in '98) on Terrorism and Democracy (the basic thesis was that terrorism is extra-effective against Western-style Democracies because panic reactions to acts of terror tend to remove the freedoms on which the society is based; terrorism therefore 'wins' against the Democracy because the rights of the citizens are increasingly compromised until the society is so locked down as to not be free at all. I really didn't think it would be that prophetic!). I can't find any way to have myself removed from this database, so now I travel Greyhound!
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
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.
Why should any regular individual be worried about these systems? From the best essay on privacy and 9/11 laws I've seen (from the former privacy czar of Canada- warning Canadians not to lose rights Americans have already lost):
"...But there also will be tangible, specific harm. The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
"But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
"If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm...
"Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight...
"The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society like Canada...
" Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society."
"...When people are worried about their safety, when we have seen the horrors of which today's breed of terrorists are capable - and there may be more - it's easy to lose perspective. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that security is all that matters and that human rights such as privacy are a luxury. But such extremes can only reward and encourage terrorism, not diminish it. They can only devastate our lives, without commensurately safeguarding them. Of course we all want to be safe. But we could be safer from terrorism - perhaps - if we permanently evacuated all the high-rise office towers, if we closed down the subways, if we forever grounded all airplanes. Yet no reasonable person would be likely to argue for adopting such measures. We'd say, "We want to be safe, yes - but not at the price of sacrificing our whole way of life." The same reasoning should apply, in my view, to arguments that privacy should indiscriminately be sacrificed on the altar of enhanced security..."
So we shouldn't have invaded Iraq because Al-Qaeda wouldn't like it?
Uhm..Al Qaeda probably was quite pleased with the invasion. They wanted to get rid of Saddam as badly as the US did. And lets not forget: the war has dramatically increased anti-American sentiments in Iraq and the rest of the world, boosting support for terrorist organisations like Al Queda. No doubt recruitment of these organisations will have gone up as a direct result of the war in Iraq.
And we're losing a guerilla war where we're killing 20 times more of the guerillas than they are of us (at least)?
You have been playing to many computer games. Wars aren't necessarily won by the ones who score the highest body count.
So we shouldn't have invaded Iraq because Al-Qaeda wouldn't like it?
Actually yes, that should have been a consideration. We should have looked at what we'd get out of it vs what the cost would be. In this case we got nothing out of it and we are paying billions each month for the privilege of occupying the place. And to top all that off we provided Al-Qaeda with the best damn recruitment photograph in history.
And it was okay that Saddam tried to hide and create WMDs, just as long as he wasn't successful?
Do you have any evidence that he was still trying to create them? I'm sorry but we don't go to war on "We think he might be doing this". And quite frankly who the hell cares what Saddam may or may not have had? I'd have started worrying about it when he had delivery systems to actually get the damn things here. And don't come back at me and say "He was in bed with the terrorists" unless you are prepared to say exactly what terrorists he was "in bed" with (Al-Qaeda hated him) and what motivation he would have had to give them WMDs.
And we're losing a guerilla war where we're killing 20 times more of the guerillas than they are of us (at least)?
I don't know that we're losing but we aren't winning now are we? If you think killing 20 of them for every one of our own is a victory then I suggest you check out the Korean War in your history book. 54,246 Americans died -- DoD estimates that we killed over 1,500,000 North Koreans/Chinese. That's one point five million. That's a ratio of slightly over 27 enemy KIA for each one of our own. And guess what? We didn't win the Korean War.
Furthermore the Korean war wasn't a guerilla war -- it was a conventional war. Every time we kill an Iraqi insurgent we piss off the local population and two or three more step forward to take his place. Does this sound like a winning formula to you? Are you prepared to kill every man of military age in Iraq so we can declare victory?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.