Slashdot Mirror
GAO Studies U.S. Government Data Mining
securitas writes "Total Information Awareness is alive and thriving. eWEEK's Caron Carlson reports on a new General Accounting Office study that says TIA-style data mining programs are rampant in federal agencies with 199 projects at 52 of 128 agencies. The Defense Intelligence Agency/DoD is the single largest user of these data mining projects (eg. Verity K2 Enterprise). The story was first reported by Reuters' Andy Sullivan (ZDNet UK mirror) and the NYT's Robert Pear, who wrote that at least 122 projects used personally identifying information like names, e-mail addresses, Social Security and driver's license numbers. The 'actual numbers are likely to be much higher' because the report excludes classified projects. Wired News' Kim Zetter writes that, in addition to government databases, federal agencies mine private databases of credit rating agencies, bank account numbers, student loan applications, etc. This week the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) released a report with privacy guidelines for data mining technology (PDF) development and use. Guidelines include data anonymization, government data access authorization and audit trails. Cynthia (Cindy) Webb's 'Total Information Dilemma' at the Washington Post is an excellent survey of media coverage of TIA, MATRIX and the GAO report 'Data Mining: Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of Uses' (mirror, both in PDF format). More at GCN, GovExec and the Guardian/AP."
I tell you all! We were right! Tin foil hats will protect you!
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Slashdot does that nospam automatically in user preferences.
I actually get very little spam in my inbox for hotmail. Their spam filters work very well. I even added support@hotmail.com to my filter so I stop getting emails to "upgrade" for 19.95 and so far they have honored it.
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
and maybe the middle man could be cut out and artists (not record companies that can afford to deal with piracy) could publish their music and recoup the costs to create it? Maybe even motivate them to make more great music and give the "industry" the boot? Honestly, the ONLY reason the "industry" exists is because of the overhead to publishing. DRM solves that and allows for the internet, etc, to be used to distribute content.
I'd gladly give up a bit of "fair use" of backing up my Avirl collection, etc, to actually get some music worth listening to.