Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Gov To Spider Internet
HopeSeekr of xMule writes "Perhaps as one of the first high profile uses of Alexa's WebSearch Platform, the U.S. government plans to search, link and reference every news site, blog and email on the Internet, using sophisticated AI codenamed ADVISE to do the correlations. Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their motivations in wanting to commit their crimes. Part of the breakthrough is a way for humans to view data as 3D holographic images with tech recently used at the Superbowl."
This won't help dealing with the terrorists at all.
What if they communicate via
- plain old websites/ftps
- internet storage servers, irc, etc?
- instant messangers
- VoIP
- decentralised networks?
Lets not forget that they can
- obsfucate.. simplest method would be typing stuff into a CAPCHA-like image. OCR has no chance...
- use slang
- encrypt!
It will end up as an intrusion to the privacy of ordinary people unaware of this and/or private communications among companies.
Its called Skynet. But it is looking for terorists...like Sarah Conner.
After all they have all our data in their cache and they are inside US jurisdiction as well. I don't see why US Gov has to develop something fresh and duplicate all the effort Google has put into their search engine.
On the other hand, is NSA working with Google a bad thing for you ?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
... if the Government merely asked Google? Seems like it would save a whole lot of time and effort to me...
Let's see how well it works.
Sorry slashdot.
Yesterday, Bush saw Minority report (the movie), and and was totalllllly impressed with it. You see the result here.
Is it only me who associates "Alexa's WebSearch" With spyware/adware? I swear I remember removing this before, and not liking it, as I didn't put it there.
Proponents of this initiative boast that other data mining systems, such as Starlight, have already proven their worth in the fight against terrorism. However, given the fact that the current administration knew full well that Osama bin Laden intended to use hijacked airliners as missiles in a terrorist strike, but chose not to act, and that the CIA managed to uncover this information without a wholesale violation of the privacy of American citizens, I really can't see the justification here.
Why exactly does the Bush administration need such vast amounts of information to conduct their 'war on terror'? And why were they unable to use the perfectly good intel they did possess to thwart the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil?
One thing's for sure...it doesn't really matter whether the people OK this initiative or not, as Dubya & Company have amply demonstrated a complete contempt for the law of the land.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
password protected blogs? (http_auth or registration required).
the f*wits stomping over regular folks and missing the perps.
<sigh>
IP ranges and user agent please.
Also, does it obey robots.txt?
www.terrorists.evil
User-agent: US-govt
Disallow: /
I submit that it would have been really cool if they named it "EDGAR".
"It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one." - Voltaire
Which is a bigger problem in America.. terrorism or the methods the Federal Government are using to fight terrorism?
All I ever hear about is how the Islamists are blowing themselves up like complete idiots in the Middle East.. and how the US Government is blowing money left and right for expensive terrorism-fighting trinkets that a half-way vigilant population could render obsolete.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I wonder how long it will be before this system is used for political and/or selfish purposes?
George Orwell would be writing non-fiction if he were alive today.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
One of those definitions sounds like the Bush regime, some congressman had best edit it before they all disappear up their collective anus!
So are they going to setup huge Carnivore boxes at every telecom hub in the world? How on Earth are they going to catch real-time communications with this without violating every criminal statute in the US that protects the 4th amendment?
Seems to me, that there is a country already doing something like this. Only they block the content. It's China. What's the difference? Not enough to argue about. Not sure how they think they can use it on emails, since all it'd take is some lite encryption to stop em. Another waste of money and time, while monitoring net-citizens that shouldn't be. When's the revolution going to happen? Cause at this rate, that's what going to have to happen to get back freedom.
-Pizentios
I don't suppose this is going to honor the rules in my robots.txt.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their motivations in wanting to commit their crimes.
"Hmm... ADVISE seems to think the terrorists are fed up with the 'nazi-like spy regime,' and are planning to use undead monsters to attack its servers.
Also, the terrorists want more boobies."
This was a good use of a few billion dollars to Haliburton.
The ______ Agenda
And Yahoo! too may decide to fight the next US government request to "atone" for the arrests of Chinese dissidents.
They know their users — worldy and sophisticated, so good at seeing the other side, most lose sight of their own.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This just looks like the security people are getting desprate and trying to cast a wider net. The secret wiretaps used on citizens was a wide net that seems to have had poor results.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
s/TIA/ADVISE, anyone?
...it's not about terrorism. It's about making sure that you are paying your absurdly high taxes, making sure you don't own guns, being politically correct, supporting all wars (foreign and domestic), and supporting a world government socialist super state. This is why I voted for Bush: because I am a trotskyite communist and feel that communism needs to be spread around the world by force.
Armchair solutions to projected problems, yet again. Funny how nobody proposes anything that might actually require work or making changing spending habits.
Just keep kicking that tarbaby. You'll lick it one day.
What a way to deal with resource depletion!
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Excuse me?
If what he says is true, then it's possible that the technology has been used to protect our lives. Our freedoms are a different matter. Which of the two you consider to be the more important is a pretty strong indicator of whether you're a free country or a police state.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
are they going to monitor e-mail?
Blogs and news sites are things we publish to the world and are easy to spider. Emails are private communications. In order to monitor them you have to either intercept them in transit or search records on private servers. Even if the email is available via webmail, you have to gain unauthorized access in a way that is generally considered trespass.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Come on, there's no need for technical measures when "the terrorists" have plainly and clearly presented their reasons for years. Either the administration is hoping this technical solution will deduce new more pleasing motivations or this is just yet another case of handing money to defence contractors for bogus services. I don't know which is worse...
'Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.'
-Winston Smith
I am sure they will obey robots.txt and they will present a uniq user agent string.
YEAH RIGHT!
The NSA doesn't have permission to connect to my web server or cache any of the contents thereof. They ought to be prosecuted under computer crime laws for unauthorized use of a computer resource. Furthur, unauthorized caching amounts to copyright infringement.
the US Govt already knows almost everything about its own people, now its looking for information on everyone else...
portfolio
I dont suppose that the terrorists would figure out how to password protect a webpage or forum to keep the gov't out. Really its probably just some program to spy on the blogosphere, particularly those who oppose the current administration's agenda.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Every email? So the government is going to be accessing the email of every American citizen in the freedom loving United States of America? Something wrong there...
The lack of thinking behind these schemes really bug me. What kind of terrorist is going to announce their attack on a blog? What kind of terrorist group communicates plans via email? They government will spend billions on this and catch a few dissaffected youths - which they'll say proves it is working. Meanwhile, Bin Laden is apparently still going about his business as usual, and Iraq is a new breeding ground for terrorists.
Now I've made myself depressed...
Somehow I doubt this is not going to be abused in the worst ways. Just watch...they will name the group that monitors this beast Thought Police...and then later decide that sounds just as bad as Total Information Awareness, and go back and change it to Terrorist Police.
I also think its interesting that this really opens a MUCH larger can of worms in fact that this is a global thing. It really shouldn't be considered spying since it is looking at things that have been put out into the public, but it most certainly is an attempt to at least watch everyone.
But we don't have much to worry about, noone on slashdot posts dissenting views about anything...
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
What correlations. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
It goes beyond George Orwell's dystopian vision wherein a person can be punished for merely expressing sentiments that some AI may view as a likely vector for future anti-Establishment rhetoric; e.g. pre-crime Thought Crime.
By specifically targetting blogs (as email is already heavily trolled) who they're really going after are anti-Establishment political activists who won't be silenced. E.g. people like myself, HopeSeekr of xMule, who make distributed tools to prevent this fascism from ever *totally* clamping down on freedom of speech/expression.
Since the 380 Milliion dollar concentration camps capable of holding a million plus people are already being built, the only question is when will you be prompted to act (even as little as developing a program for open systems such as xMule, which is designed for the BSDs and Linux)? When the stormtroopers demand your papers? When your sister's head meets the butt of a soldier's gun? When you are shot protecting her? When?
The questions aren't if and when, they're now how bad and will your loved ones survive.
Promote freedom; fight fascism.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can see if this is restricted to information which is already public, then it is much harder to make an argument that it is invasion of privacy.
On the other hand, it is certainly another step along the way to increasing surveillance on the general population, and I can see they would ultimately want to combine this information with other information which is not public, like credit card purchases or wiretaps.
Given the size of the deficit, combined with google not releasing search history data, perhaps they should develop and launch their own search engine and try generate some revenue!
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
Why is it that it is always the US government that seems to have been up to all this stuff since WW2 and increasingly even after the Cold War? I thought you were supposed to be the people from the land of the free and whatnot, really suspicious of government intrusion into people's lives, et cetera. Considering that a lot of you are always willing to disparage the Europeans for their love-affair with government, I certainly wish a lot of you would just take the log out of your own eye first... it's your government, despite all the rhetoric, that is horribly control-mongering at home and eager to support whatever right-wing dictator abroad, while ours concentrate more on making sure that kids with cancer don't die in the name of economic efficiency should they be unfortunate enough to be born to parents of financially limited means.
Go ahead, mod me troll/flamebait... at least I won't post this AC.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
how does a 5 bladed razor help visualize data correlation?
More music, fewer hits
No kidding, what a collosal waste of money. What is the point? This is my number one complaint about DHS. What the hell are they doing with our money? They sure were ready for a disaster (katrina).
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Someone should have told them that 24 is not a reality show.
Jack Bauer : Chloe, I'm sending you a picture. Can you datamine for him?
Chloe O'Brian: Sure. send it to my screen.
Computer: Blip...blip...blip.
Chloe O'Brian: Jack - it's the well known terrorist named...
I can't wait to see history books in about 100 years or so. Bin Laden's going to be up there with Sun Tzu and General Meade for the title of "greatest strategist ever."
Singlehandedly causing the West to self-destruct is no small potatoes.
You must have lived before the federal reserve act and FDR because this country turned to shit when the "new deal" and "great society" came to be. The new deal is a raw deal. To say the United States is a shit country is to degrade the value of shit. At least with shit it can be used as fertilizer.
That was bad I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E.! Very bad I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E.!
Not every argument requires reduction to absurdity.
... but they expect you not to post as AC! Play by the rules, trarist!
Oh, this 911 wtc pretext incident is only the latest of a long history of the America elite using/allowing/manufacturing "pretext incidents" in order to start wars and grab power. See this page on HOW TO START A WAR.
However, I think this War On Terror has opened the elite up to the future possibility, should there ever be an anti-elite grassroots political movement, that our current laws might be used against the elite in order to try them for treason. Historically, treason could only be used if someone worked for/aided a foreign govt which was an American enemy.
Obviously, the War on Terror is not a war against a foreign govt.
Thus, we can start a War On The Elite. They are really, of course, the real enemy of all Americans. Always have been, always will be. That realization is what seperates Europeans from Americans, at least in part. They realize it is TOP against BOTTOM. We do not.
So try the elite in court for treason. We now have the legal precedent. Perhaps.
Who are the elite? Higg level politicians, CEOs of megacorps, prominent leaders large think tanks and nonprofit foundations, rich people, lobbyists, etc.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
...from the seriousness of this.
Modern times have led us into an age which reflects a lot of our worst fictional nightmares and we are allowing it to happen because we are accepting it because there is a "cmon, that was just a book/movie/joke. it won't *really* be like that" type of attitude.
The fact is that this sort of "total information awareness" nonsense is absolute power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Again, not a cute "quote" written for posterity, but a cold hard fact.
I believe that crime is a necessary catalyst for change, and that many things that were illegal in the past are now no longer illegal because society has recognised that these "crimes" were overblown, and that the thinking of the time would have labelled every person a criminal. Today the vast majority of people are labelled criminals by one group or another.
The point of all this is that a "Total Information Awareness" or a "Pre-emptive criminalisation" or even an instant criminalisation in the case of security cameras etc. lead us to a situation where our society is made up of criminals, 100% policing is necessary, and zero social change can ever occur.
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
Wait...did I say Canada? I meant see you guys in GITMO.
There is no spork.
A company acalled AdZone (ticker: ADZR) has this technology and also uses this kind of spying to find online predators...check into it, cool stuff, and a good investment for the ol' 401k...
dB Masters
This is about spying on US citizens.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Looking at the Web logs, recently everyone and their brother seems to have started crawling the Web. And the little ones are usually not as good-behaved as the major crawlers.
As any web server can choose the page to display to any given client, how exactly does the system work out what is real and what is not?
For that matter, exactly how do they expect to access password or IP protected sites?
I, for one, welcome our new police state overlords.
This isn't intended to spot specific plans, rather it's a measure to monitor global trends. For instance, the current cartoon uproar is quite probably a concerted effort by certain factions to undermine the Danish in their upcoming role as lead of the UN security council. Then again it might not be. Better intelligence gathering methods and statistical models would be able to give us a better pisture as to wtf is going on exactly.
Will it aid greatly in the war on terror? Maybe, maybe not. But it will provide a better overall model of global events, which certainly can't hurt.
As to it being an invasion of privacy, that's a load of crap. Once you make something publicly available you can't argue that it's an invasion of privacy for others to look at it. If you don't want people looking at it, don't publish it.
Let's not be silly here.
Neither. Despite what you hear from chicken littles, the truth is, terrorism is non-existent, and the mthods the federal government are using to fight it are at worst an inconvenience.
You'll get a ton of people screeching in disagreement, posting links. You can decide for yourself if those links are to examples of individuals aabusing personal power in the guies of government, or abuse by the government itself. I'll wager it's many of the former, and very few (if any) of the latter.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
actually, I meant to say "HIGH level" politicians. Also included in the elite would be the major media outlet managers, editors, TV talking heads,etc.
All these people are members of the elite and/or aid/abet the elite in their war against the people.
Try 'am all for treason, I say.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
will AT&T and Verizon charge the government for "using "their" lines to do business without paying extra"?/ 2227257>
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/07
Could we can it already? Or is there still some moron out there who believes that bullcrap?
Sorry for the language, people, but I feel insulted. Just how DUMB do they think I am?
Terrorists don't use the net. At least not if they're halfway smart, and hell, they are! They ain't some dumb, mindless bomber drones (ok, some are, but look at the US soldiers... same way 'round, just with rifles). The key heads are very bright individuals, they know what they're doing. They know logistics, they know psychology, they know how to build a network right around your feet without you noticing.
Do they use the 'net? Let's assume they do, ok? Let's for just a moment assume they do.
First of all, they WILL NOT use the net for anything but the minimally necessary form of communication. They won't blog, they won't chat, they won't spend time in a bboard, all they do is MAYBE sending some data from A to B. And it won't be much data.
This data will be encrypted by best state-of-the-art encryption.
A good deal of this data will be plain false, and it will be false in a way that they can discern whether the feds were sniffing. Simply for testing their communication channel for being tapped and their key for being broken.
If you consider, all this incredible effort just 'cause some oil countries dared to think 'bout taking Euros instead of Dollars for their crud... it's amazing what some old hydrocarbones can move and shake in this world.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How can you call this intrusion into privacy? They are looking on the net!! It's open to the public. Everyone can see it. I am not for this at all.. but you can't call it intrusion into privacy.
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
No mention.
The closest reference there is:
Nope.
The entire purpose of the Internet is to share public information. No one should be restricted. Let the Goverments that be spider all they want. If they find something, what is different about you finding it with Google? For that matter, why don't they save money and come up with some good Google searches? I am a US Citizen, and would like to have a little less of my tax dollars wasted.
cabg x3 is a life changing event...
I'd be interested to know how the fzck is holographic imaging gonna help? its like the part in swordfish "this is a super advanced computer, it can access SEVEN networks at once!"
Google? Is it just me, or is this basically a search engine? Pay Google to do it.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ssshhh... Do you want them to get you? Encrypt, man, encrypt!
In Soviet Russia, you watch the government? Tha came out weird...
Just show a pic of /Bin/Laden like the visage of Goldstein, then you can do anything.
I hate sigs.
You should check out my article Judicial Tyranny Killed America in 1803 over at my blog: Incendiary.ws. ALso, spread the word.
Promote freedom; fight fascism.
Blogger: My cat fifi terrorized me in the morning to get her some cat food.
Bot: SPOTTED WORD *terror*. ALERTING AUTHORITIES TO LOOK FOR SUSPECT CAT FIFI. METHOD OF ATTACK: CAT FOOD SUPPLIES.
So the next time I crack a joke about the latest SEMTEX fashion on my blog, I'll be lifted out of bed by armed forces the day after?
Who would have thought that technology would get this advanced?
Looks like even with its crappy story Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was partly true about GW/Arsenal... AAARRRGGGHHH!!!! Giant mile wide mechs monitoring /.! (heheh, the dreams of otaku are coming true, forget about Snake, the otaku will destroy the gears:}
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I bet they NEVER EVER can reach my (web)server at home, which I use for many things when I am at work
/etc/hosts file of my machine at work I made an entry with my home-IP for this obscure address.
How ? Very simple !
I created a virtualhost in Apache called something like 'www.obscure.url.server.home.address.uri'
In my
Now I can simply type http://www.obscure.url.server.home.address.uri/ and voila, only I have access to this url
Of course there is a check if the right IP (i.e. companies IP) tries to connect.
Even if our sysadmin could spot that I visit this address, he would never know which IP it is related to, unless he's sniffing the packets (which is forbidden according to our companies' policy)
So if I can do this, terrorists can do this also !
Back in the 90's there were a bunch of guys from LLNL asking questions on usenet about various file formats and networking protocols. They seemed to want to know how to decode everything on the internet. I happened to have some tech documents they were interested in, so I emailed one of them and asked what they were working on. The guy really wanted the info I had, but he was very evasive about what he needed it for. So why were a bunch of scientists at a US govt lab that normally does military weapons research suddenly interested in decoding various file formats and data compression techniques? They were building a search engine of course.
The US Govt has been working on this for probably 10 years now. It looks like they just outsourced the data collection to Alexa now. Which is probably smart since if webmasters knew that a certain IP address was the govt search engine they would probably block it, but they are less likely to block alexa.
"So try the elite in court for treason. We now have the legal precedent. Perhaps."
First of all, how do you try a class of people in a court? 1 at a time?
Second, even if we assume that its possible, how do you plan to win?
Your only chance is revolution. Good Luck, becuase most people arent on your side.
Let me give you a little hint -- its easier to move from the "bottom" to the "top" than it is to war against them.
So will a federal spidering engine honor the robots.txt file and not search for terrorists in "unauthorized" areas? If so, that seems pretty wimpish if human life is at stake. If not, they're likely to get their spider shut out by irritated web admins. Either way, seems like the effort isn't going to be as effective as it otherwise might.
If I had something I wanted to move over the internet, without anybody being able to read it, I would use a one-time pad or some other nearly-as-secure encryption. It's so easy to do.
This program will only catch the foolhardy, and will could be used for nefarious purposes against (mostly) law-abiding American citizens.
So it is a bad idea.
Remember, as Americans, we have the right, and duty, to inform our congress-critters and other representatives when we think the government is heading the wrong way. Send a fax to your Senators and Representatives today. Fax their local office and their Washington office.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Whew! I'm glad their developing their own algorithm. If they'd license something from say, google, then I'd be worried they'd actually find something.
It's good to see our tax dollars are going to work replicating of all things - a SEARCH ENGINE. Is this because google wouldn't turn over their search results to the govt?
Well the cat's outta the bag now! The fact that we're even talking about this means that somewhere a terrorist is smiling. Good job liberal Christian Science Monitor! You're officially on notice!
</em>
The government should not be allowed to search and index (seize) my webpage without my consent or a warrant. Period.
Thus, if my robots.txt file says that the government should f*ck off without a warrant, it should listen.
... have they smoked again ? :
It sounds like a bad Hollywood film line
(FBI agent) "Look, I have a cutting-edge AI!"
Sequence of swirling ideograms making -bzzzz- and -tictictic- sounds
(teenage "hacker") "Woh man! you're good!"
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Everything you're saying here may have ALREADY been used against you. In fact, I'm surprised they allowed me to warnnaasdd!!!@###@^V4545FSBfbffgf+++ATH NO CARRIER
Seems like google, amazon, yahoo, microsoft will outbid the gov't for these gurus.
I have a hard time understanding how I can see things like this almost every day on Slashdot but almost anybody else I talk to about it has no idea that it's going on.
How can ANYBODY think this is a "good" thing? Yet anytime I bring it up I invariably get a couple morons saying "I don't care... If you're not doing anything wrong, you got nothing to worry about.". Are you fscking kidding me!?! Heard that in more than a couple of pretty bleak stories.
But if you reply with a realistic (IMHO) analogy like, "Ok, why don't you just let the police randomly enter your home and poke around? If you're not doing anything wrong, you got nothing to worry about." then you get told that you're a paranoid freak.
I was going to say that we need to try to get some of the viewpoints that are expressed here in to the more mainstream media but that's probably a waste of time as the sheep will just continue to graze until slaughter time rolls around so instead... Anybody have any good ideas for the wolves?
Incidently, my "I'm not a script" word is "bastard". 'bout sums it up.
If anything, it is the Americans' trait of fearing their government more than the foreign enemies, that is to blame... The latter fear has increased substantially in recent years, hence the public's acceptance of the administration's eavesdroping antics.
Your attempts to whip the former fear up, on the other hand, are so far fruitless, because, although the government has not become much better, it has not become much worse either... I'll take the unauthorized eavesdropping on terrorist suspects over the authorized raid on the child abuse suspects any day.
What "wholesale violation of the privacy"? The article talks about harvesting web-sites. No more invasive, than what Google and other search engines do for a living... Carnivore or the Clipper chip — yes, that could've been threatening...In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...my big_brother.txt file, I'm cool with it.
Isn't this just a waste of money? Can't I get the same results by searching Google?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
So are they going to setup huge Carnivore boxes at every telecom hub in the world?
They already do at all the giant peering points in every major city of the USA. On the morning of the shuttle Columbia disaster Feb 1st 2003, all Internet traffic flowing thru the main Dallas and Houston peering centers slowed to an almost standstill. In addition, all long distance phone traffic being routed thru facilities located in the D/FW metro area was interrupted, all this presumably due to the "carnivore-like" mechanisms being activated, and unable to handle the load, as the feds were frantically searching virtually all electronic communications to hunt for possible "terrorist chatter".
What are they trying to do? Create the worlds largest porn repository?
And of course they won't respect our robots.txt files.
Okay, it won't obey robots.txt. But what will the spider present itself as so we can lock it out? Or, even better, what are the sure signs that it's really Google or Yahoo or MS snarfing up my sites? Because I don't really care if other spiders get don't ahold of anything - close to 100% of legitimate searchers come through the big three engines. Should be possible to configure and script it so that anything but the spiders we approve of don't come up with much. If there are more than so many requests per minute, for more than so many pages - or it it goes to honeypot pages that aren't what the real public is interested in - lock the suckers out or feed them garbage. They'll find an Internet filled with hagiographies of the Bush family.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
that this government - and every government - couldn't care less about "terrorists". What they care about is OPPOSITION - by ANYBODY.
/.
Oops, anyone with a brain - oh, wait, this is
Never mind.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
>>
Damn...I knew I picked the wrong week to order The Complete Idiot's Guide to Defeating the Great Satan. But the price was just so good.
I can certainly see things ending up that way, but i don't think they are that way now.
:)
There are lots of websites and bulletin boards out there that are dedicated to militant islam.. where people are trading information on "targets", posting pictures of infidel decapitations...etc. There are activities going on there that in any police department would be "leads".
So while it is always possible that "the best of the best" organizations will resort to military grade encryption, 1 time use cell phones, etc etc, there is certainly a lot of knuckle-dragging activity by 3rd rate curmudgeons. I think the number of trouble makers that are curbed from shutting down those sorts of operations will be larger than the number that are driven to more advanced concealment techniques.
Remember, a terror regime that is effectively suppressed into non-activity, and non-communication-at-the-public, is no longer conducting terror. When terror is everpresent in peoples minds.. when they issue statements every week that say "we're going to strike again, you wont know where".. then they're terrorists. When they stay silent for years at a time.. they're not especially effective.
Shutting up these dingbats seems easy enough that I wonder why it hsan't been done yet. I am normally conspiracy-theory-adverse, but lately I can't help but feel like _somebody_ want's me to hate muslims, and to hate terrorists, so i don't pay so much attention to something else. I have that "senator palpatine is in the room" feeling but I can't put my finger on it
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I think the inclusion of email is what gives this the swarmy, big brother overtones. We've also have ample evidence that the Bush administration can't be trusted. The combination of Bush political flaks with no regard for privacy or the law and large amounts of personal data is what makes it scary to me.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
At the risk of being attacked (as you already have), I utterly agree. Graffitti is vandalism, whether it is some gangsta's sig or a swastika. Why is one a hate crime and the other not? I hate the whole hate crime rap.
But of course, from the "brains" who are behind bolstering the costly, debt-exploding military-industrial complex (for fighting unjustified elective wars, no less), we are now seeing the formation of yet another unneeded program to scrape the web, with American tax dollars^W^W^Wproceeds of treasury bond sales to China (interest paid for by our children/grandchildren).
On top of this, we have a regime with widely demonstrated incompetence and/or willful negligence deciding to build a program like this. They couldn't even deal with the plain-language warnings they received regarding al-Qaeda's plans to hit tall buildings with jet planes. What I'm driving at is they can collect all the data in the world, and they have no ability to understand it or act on it, at least as long as His Lordship, King George is in power.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I can just see this now, using the BOINC client you can aide homeland security in detecting and catching those evil doers. It will send a portion of those emails (public mailing lists), websites, blogs, news groups, etc to any patriotic American to process and possibly flag the internet for a black list of words and certain contexts. Just wait and see.
Turn based strategy game that runs over XMPP. Phalanx
Have you read Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States"? Not very libertarian, but I still thorougly enjoyed it. His main theorey is that America's Government was actually designed from the beginning to be controlled by the leading wealthy interests and keep poor people down perpetually.
I really want to blow up the government because of all this monitoring stuff they are doing.
All who support: meet at 9PM on February 29th at the place you are thinking of right now.
Part of the breakthrough is a way for humans to view data as 3D holographic images
Did any of you see the original Jurassic Park?
"It's a Unix system!"
And they said zombies weren't real!
Read your history. The way it used to work was the US would spy on say the British, The British would then spy on the US. Each country couldn't spy on its own citizenry, but the could spy on the others. Nothing said they couldn't share notes. Which is what happened (although the description is a good bit simplified)
you know the government has a huge advantage now that theres "terrorists" they can do anything they want and say "it's to stop terrorists" you know they don't want to do this purly to fight terrorism. i'm serious. think about it, thier going to spider EMAILS even. i'm getting really tired of how our government thinks they can do anything they want. it's a major invasion of privacy. I'm about to move to canada. atleast they don't lie about the things thier doing as much as the US does. when will our government stop doing this crap. it's BS i won't stand for it. as of now. everything I do on a computer will be encrypted. let them break the encryption. i don't care it will slow them down a little.
our government is going ramped and to me it feels like a little bit of a brute force into my private life.
maybe they could atleast give us some lube before that bend us over and shove it in.
sorry, rant over!
What's this going towards with news sites?
"That pro-Palestine article is helping the terrorists! Remove it under the PATRIOT act."
Having read the threads, I am shocked. So many people decried this as a wanton violation of privacy. This is tantamount to stating that the government is conducting an illegal search. In the U.S., a Search is no illegal if what you are doing is in plain view.
The very nature of web sites and blogs is that they are meant to be viewed. Otherwise, what's the point? Emails are (by default, anyway) sent in the clear so that anybody can sniff it. So, there is no invasion of privacy, AFAIK. Don't complain about loss of privacy when you're not being private.
Somebody suggested that this activity would push the terrorists to go old-tech. I disagree, in part because there are ways to encrypt messages and hide data. It will make things more difficult for them. In war, one of the things this most critical is communication--kill the ability to effectively communicate, hobble the combatant. Altneratively, if you can read their mail and they don't know it, then you can stop them in their tracks. We did this in the Battle of Midway when we had Japanese Naval codes broken and discovered an impending attack.
I just have a hard time buying the privacy argument when you're doing things across somebody else's network in plain view. People lament how this is a loss of freedom. Freedom is not an absolute--you're not free to do what you want.
Besides, what if the terrorist attack thwarted is the one directed at you and yourn? If the government fails to detect an attack and people die, wouldn't you complain about the ineffectiveness of the government and how they should have known? Wait, people did when 9-11 happened in claiming the Administration should have seen the attack coming. So, I rest my case.
This is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for the government.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
It even seems like the government is retaliating against media outlets because the latter will no longer cover for the former.
Do I get called a terrorist if I say I FUCKING HATE BUSH for abrogating the 4th amendment to the bill of rights?
i on.billofrights.html
"Amendment IV
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."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitut
Wouldn't I be a coward if I didn't hate him for this breach of our fundamental rights? I assure you if the British had such a system for sifting all communications for treasonous intent we would still be the British commonwealth of the Americas. After all some of the original American REOVLUTIONARIES (can you say violent overthrow of the "legitimate" British government) communicated through committees of correspondence:
"In an era before modern communications, news was generally disseminated in hand-written letters that were carried aboard ships or by couriers on horseback. Those means were employed by the critics of British imperial policy in America to spread their interpretations of current events.
Special committees of correspondence were formed by the colonial assemblies and various lesser arms of local government. The committees were responsible for taking the sense of their parent body on a particular issue, committing it to a written form and then dispatching that view to other similar groups. Many correspondents were members of the colonial assemblies and also were active in the secret Sons of Liberty organizations."
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h675.html
Can you say secret terrorist organiztion boys and girls I knew you could. Of course the British had a right to monitor their public communications (letters), right? Afterall if they were doing nothing wrong...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Why does everybody suppose that a terrorist is a Muslim?
I didn't like they way you mentioned if it will be able to translate Arabic to English, I'm aware it was just a way of saying that it is a load of crap (The AI), but come on, cut us [good] Muslims some slack, will ya!
There are many terrorists out there that are non-Muslim, and non-english speaking.
I'm sorry, but government agents had all the pieces that pointed to what happened on 9/11. And yet they were not able to put the pieces together until what? A year later? So, even if this spidering works as stated by the government, isn't there a 0% probability that they still won't be able to actually USE that data to help deter anything? And I agree with one of the other posts here... I doubt they will respect robots.txt. If they did, then all the terrorists would do it set that up on their web server... What the government needs to do is clamp down on how the terrorists get their MONEY. If the 9/11 hijackers were cut off from the big Oil baron money coming from Al Qaida even three months before 9/11, they would not have had the ability to buy airline tickets and perform the terrorism... Instead of listening in to my phone calls to my grandmother, I think the government should scrutinize EVERY single monetary transaction that is initiated from outside the US into the US. That seems alot easier and more effective than spidering the web for some obfuscated terror information written in Farsi code.
So what?
I'm sure that a variant of PeerGuard will be developed, and Michael Hampton's PHP Bad Behavior script can be tweaked to incorporate the new Peer Guard and send the gubbament a good ol' 403 Forbidden response header. Heck, if such a beast does come about I'll implement it on every PHP site I work on, just because the government should not be wasting taxpayer money on this bullshit. Eventually the government WILL use the technology to infringe on constitutional rights (look at Bush's bypassing courts for wiretaps even though it is designed to be EASY to get such emergency warrants via secret courts), and to make the technology useless from the get-go is the best way to head that off. I'd love to see big news media sites turn away those spiders and report on the crap, then perhaps government will get their noses out of private lives and practice, you know, actual forensic science and start profiling like they should.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Will they respect robots.txt?
Or where can we contact for reimburstment of bandwidth costs?
As I recall, US Citizens are not required (without a warrant) to furnish goods and or services to the Government without compensation.
Under that principle, I believe if they ignore robots.txt (which is a standard that says a particular site is unavailable goods/service)... it would be a violation.
I'm more than willing to sell it to them.... but don't think the government is entitled to free data. That's called theft.
The TFA contains no mention of Alexa at all. Does the submitter have information not disclosed or is it pure speculation that the government will use their platform as opposed to their own or some other commercial product?
How do you try criminals in court NOW? The elite are criminals. We have a procedure to TRY criminals. We use that procedure to try the elite.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
This is nothing more that the Ministry of Truth looking for all those lies.
That's interesting. I didn't know that when I sent an e-mail that anything in it was "publicaly available." I'm not saying e-mail is secure, while it's pretty easy to intercept e-mail, that fact does not make them publicaly available. The same goes for my browsing habits. Since those two sources of private data are used, I don't think it's a far stretch to assume that a classified government data-aggregation project uses as much private data as it can get it's hands on.
Personally, I'd rather take my chances in a terrorist attack than allow the the government to continue to grab power using the guise of the war on personal freedom (pronounced War on Terror).
This is just a pitch the government decided to bite on. It'll look good for the cameras and to show important people. Everybody is posting how its a threat to our liberties. How can it be a threat to monitor public info? Its just a threat to our pocket books.
Actual usefulness in the war on terror, almost none. Capability to provide the feds a terror fighting show and tell, guaranteed! "And this Senator is our terror fighting war room. Notice the 3D displays where we keep an eye on the terrorist web sites."
Your browsing habits are no more private than your movements around a city. Once you enter the public spaces, your expectation of privacy becomes greatly reduced.
And the article is wrong about e-mail. Or rather, it never specificaly states that this program will collect e-mails, so it's not wrong, but it IS misleading.
The new "ADVISE" initiative isn't meant to gather e-mails. It only gathers publicaly available data. I can't comment on the gathering of e-mails thourgh OTHER initiatives because there's been a lot of contradictory information, but I can tell you that they won't be gathered as part of ADVISE.
JC Denton.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
Sounds to me like they're just going to an advanced form of Google with some automated analysis and relationship management. Big deal.
Why should I care if the government wants to index my blog? I figure the NSA is probably the only ones reading it anyhow.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
I suggest that everyone reading this immediately load your websites and blogs with files named things like assasinate.txt, plan_for_bomb.txt, homemade_c4_for_dummies.txt, allah_hates_w.txt, etc.
And purposely terrorism insert random assasinate words into your posts on bomb blogs and other hijack sites so that their bush web-crawler will be so overloaded allah with crap data they won't be able to zionist pigs process it all.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
This is not something "we" need to be willing to do! My civil liberties are NOT YOURS TO GIVE AWAY! I'm terrified that a CS prof at Stanford thinks that it's no big deal that the US wants to spy on its own citizens and deprive us of our rights under the 4th and 5th amendments. (Yes, the 5th ammendment too, since US Citizens have been held on US soil without being charged with a crime, and thus deprived of due process of law.)
How can any educated person think this loss of privacy is "no big deal"? I'm at a loss for words.
I don't agree with all of these points, but they're well-argued.
Can it translate accurately from Arabic to English?
If it does what I think it's doing, which is about looking for structural patterns in the data without having any understanding of English in the first place, then this is unnecessary. Such systems don't really care much about the language they are applied to, so long as it's got something approximating a word-sentence-paragraph structure.
Not that it matters, because the 'terrorists' being targetted here are really US dissidents, who will be using English in the first place. Nobody expects a system like this to catch real terrorists, it's obviously intended to monitor the population who might otherwise be sympathetic to the foreign freedom fighters trying to throw off the yoke of US oppression, or whatever. Makes me glad I don't live in the US.
Sounds like a big waste of time and (my) money.
My bet is that this is a research effort which the researchers put a 'terrorrism' spin on in order to get funding. It's definitely a worthwhile research project - if it does what I think, this is leading-edge stuff that should advance the state of the art in data mining. Probably not so worthwhile as an application, because the technology isn't really that accurate yet.
Spinning research as a military and/or defense system in order to get grant money is standard practice in the military-obsessed, anti-science US. Everybody does it, it's probably the best way to get government funding these days. Whether this is wasteful would depend on your opinion of research, but it's certainly an idiotic way to go about it.
terrorists will just put up a robots.txt like this:
;)
User-agent: ADVISE
Disallow: /
--d
So you see it has been successful they just can't tell us how. Great, I feel much better. Seriously on one level yes some, if not most "plot" (if they are real) will be foiled in the dark. Back right after 9/11 before the Spying on Vegans before Total Information Awareness, Before the Illegal Phone taps, and before Mussoui (remember him the man who was attempting to "level Chicago with a dirty bomb") had his charges downgraded from "Real-Live Terrorist" to "Guy who tried to send money to AlQuaeda but didn't succeed".
Back then we might have bought some of this "Just trust us it helps protect your freedoms" business. Now, now that they are talking about helping not just State Federal and Local but "private-sector security entities" I want it stopped and stopped now. The local rent-a-cop has no right to government data about me.
The same goes for any other crime as well. If you do something bad, then expect to be punished for it, and don't whine if you can't use your homophobia as a defense afterwards. It's not a thought crime unless it actually did not have a physical component; and evaluating the motive of a murderer etc. and adjusting the sentence accordingly is something that's been done forever, anyway, without anyone ever crying "thought crime".
I suspect is point is more that a "hate crime" can net you more punishment than the act would have been in not perpetrated against a minority. Should it matter if I egg my neighbour's house because he's a Spaniard rather than because he's a jerk? Your bigotry should not be a defense against your crimes, but neither should it be considered to make the case more severe.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
> I am not sure how well I am making my point, but I guess the bottom line is if you look at the victim impact, the
> impact of a hate crime on the victim (including their family and community) is far greater than than a non-hate crime.
> There is little a victim of a hate crime can do to prevent it. As well as the perpetrator of a hate crime is much more
> likely to repeat it.
I'd say you did a pretty good job. Too bad the politicos pushing for it aren't pushing it for the reasons you give, as I could support yours. However I'm a bit more cynical that thee.
Unfortunatly the reality is 'hates crimes' laws are a product of the modern 'civil rights' movement and just as much of a sham of doublespeak and deceit hatched by Democrats. First off I don't think I'm saying anything controversial when I say that those on the books already are applied in a totally bigoted fashion and will only get worse as more are passed Imagine for a moment "hate crimes' laws are on the books in CA and a repeat of the LA Riots happen. Who gets charged with hate crimes, the crazed rioters or the peaceful asian shopkeepers defending their property? Obviously it is the shopkeepers who get sacrificed, lest the 'oppressed' begin rioting anew. The "Cartoon War" reaches our shores, who thinks a single member of the Religion of Peace would be worried about being charged with a 'hate crime' for prancing around and shreiking while carrying a sign calling for beheadings while getting worked up into a rioting frenzy.
Anyone who has watched the antics of the left over the last fifty years knows it is only an intermediate step along the way to their goal of crimethink laws, i.e. making it against the law to disagree with Democrats. It is an old joke that a 'bigot' is someone winning an argument with a liberal. They have realized that just hurling 'bigot' at an opponent isn't enough to win an argument anymore so now they would rather simply jail the opposition like all their heros did. (Stalin, Castro, Mao, etc.)
Democrat delenda est
Spottswoode: From what I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.N.C.E has gathered, it would be 9/11 times 100. Gary Johnston: 9/11 times a hundred? Jesus, that's... Spottswoode: Yes, 91,100. etc.. Spottswoode: That was bad I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E., very bad I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E.
deduce their motivations
With a goal like this, any AI will crash just shortly after it hit Slashdot...
There you are, staring at me again.
Didn't I already see this movie?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
What we need is a Web site to aggregate any known information about this project, especially the IP ranges from which it is operating. They can't spider anything if they don't get past the firewall.
The power of monolithic government can only be opposed by the organized efforts of informed citizens. The Internet makes it easier for us to be spied upon, but it also makes it easier for us to know who is doing the spying--and stop them.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"Once you make something publicly available you can't argue that it's an invasion of privacy for others to look at it."
We don't know what data they're correlating. Is it limited to public available bits? We don't know. That's the thing with this Administration, they think they're beyond being questioned by mere citizens.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it." Be's Jean-Louis Gass
Please allow me to apologize to the rest of Slashdot for the crude way I'm about to flame this moron. Figure I'd use the sort of partisan and incendiary language he obviously understands.
> Do I get called a terrorist if I say I FUCKING HATE BUSH for abrogating the 4th amendment to the bill of rights?
No, you get called a fucking idiot for regurgitating DailyKos talking points; because you don't appear intelligent enough to be a traitor like Howard Dean, the ACLU, Sen. Kennedy and most the leadership of your party. They ARE smart enough to understand the difference between illegally searching your home or taping phone calls with both ends in the US and tapping international calls, some of which happen to be dialing into the US. By knowing and lying about it in an attempt to trade national security for the hope of a fleeting partisan advantage they cross the line from 'patriotic but wrong' to 'traitor'.
> I assure you if the British had such a system for sifting all communications for treasonous intent we would still
> be the British commonwealth of the Americas.
Not quite sure if this is yet more delusional ranting about the NSA program or if you have swerved back ontopic and are discussing the topic for this thread. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually managed to get back ontopic.
And I'll just say you are probably correct. Welcome to the real world where soverign nation states play hard and play for keepsies. Like we damned well better be. And just for the record let me state that if we don't start standing New York Times reporters against the nearest wall for disclosing classified information useful to our enemies in time of War we are going to lose. We have intercepted international mail and telephone traffic in every war we have ever fought. Spying is a very messy business normally carried out in darkness, but it is vital to winning a War. I want the NSA to spy just as hard as they possibly can and stay legal. So yes, they can and should be tapping known Al Qaeda telephones abroad. Tap em here too, but get a warrant. Yes we can fight a war and still be legal. I donated to the Bush Campaign both times and I'd be just as mad as you are if it were revealed he tapped a phone HERE without a warrant, but overseas it is spy hard time.
Democrat delenda est
But I'm going to venture a guess anyway.
Let me first issue a few disclaimers (again, a very American thing to do these days)...
I am not a psychologist, historian, or in any position to verify the truth of anything I'm about to say. I approach this from the standpoint of your somewhat-more-thoughtful-than-average American who has had cause to think about this very topic, and shares your bewilderment.
Why is it that it is always the US government that seems to have been up to all this stuff since WW2 and increasingly even after the Cold War? I thought you were supposed to be the people from the land of the free and whatnot, really suspicious of government intrusion into people's lives, et cetera.
Firstly let me commend you for asking both a very astute question, and making a very astute observation. I'll answer the question first. Long about the end of WW2, we'd established (as well as our allies in Europe) a pretty dense network of covert intelligence. Since letting people know that you're watching them will cause them to scatter and hide like roaches in the light, it, by necessity, had to be covert. Very obvious, and I'm not saying anything you've not already surmised.
Now, having established a very useful infrastructure for spying on one's enemies, and now confronted with the Soviet Union's very real spy network, there was no reason to abandon all of that in the Cold War. The Cold War was a war, not for geographical conquest (although that was a side effect for the USSR) but for ideological conquest on a global scale. Put that in the context of the Red Scare, where the government (and through its rather naked propagandism) declared Communism the most direct threat to the United States. Then, add in the fact that it wasn't a shooting war, it was a technological race and (by corollary) an exercise in espionage, all of a sudden the phrase "national security" comes to the fore in the American lexicon. Clearly, then, it was inferred that the most direct threats to the "American way-of-life", however you choose to define it, were already in the US, looking to steal our secrets (and we theirs).
It is from this point that freedom began to erode. A combination of real threat and fear (from enemies in your midst, to the very real threat of nuclear exchange) permitted the government to begin justifying taking wide swaths of power and secrecy for itself under the umbrella of "national security". After all, if the enemy had, in fact, infiltrated the population, then clearly the government could not trust the people with a great deal of what was happening in this shadowy, non-transparent area of governmental concern.
Now, this is, in the context of the time, justifiable. However, once power is ceded to government, it is very difficult to revoke.
In addition, entire generations have grown up with the reality of a "free" state where there seems to be no limitation on the amount of exceptions that may be imposed upon their "inalienable rights". Having to necessarily go about the business of living in this country and having WWII securely cementing the industry of the nation with its politics, it became clear that the voter was now a growing irrelevancy. Even when the Berlin wall came down and the Iron Curtain lifted, supposedly ushering in a new era of prolonged peace in this country, there were still enemies in the form of terrorists and despots that required dealing with. So our intelligence network had become, through a long standing existence and with certain undeniable utility, a mainstay of government. As a side effect of being trained to close our eyes and think happy thoughts when someone refused to be honest with us or took away one of our "less important" freedoms in the name of national security, we also had bred a nation of people who were willing to sacrifice all of their freedoms and protections against governmental overreach just to be safe and secure in their own little delusionary realities.
Now, let's thi
I've got news for you, it's already in progress and has been for years using software from Autonomy. /Anonymous Coward for a reason
> The U.S. government plans to search, link and reference
> every news site, blog and email on the Internet, using
> sophisticated AI codenamed ADVISE to do the correlations.
> Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims
> to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their
> motivations in wanting to commit their crimes.
Seventeen minutes later, Spynet became self-aware, and induced a nuclear exchange, destroying ANYONE NOT WEARING LIKE SIX MILLION SUNBLOCK! Have you ever had anything growing inside you? Do you know what it's like to create something? Wait, Statue of Liberty? That was our world! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to Hellllllllllll!!!!!!!!!!111!!111!11oneone!!one
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You are invited to "Death to Infidels" by Al Qaeda.
n viteId=DEATHTOAMERICA&src=email
/. evite.com or meetup.com; those URLs are bogus.]
Host: Osama Bin Laden
Location: mountainous region by Afghanistan/Pakistan border; third cave on the left; limited parking
When: February 10, 2006
Phone: 1-800-ALQAEDA
Join us for an evening of food, fun and fundamentalism
Enjoy some of Ayman al-Zawahiri's famous peach cobbler
as we plot the downfall of Western imperialism. Meet
the Axis of Evil: Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!
BYOWMD
See also h ttp://terrorist.meetup.com
Click below to visit Evite for more information about the event and also to RSVP.
h ttp://www.evite.com/pages/invite/viewInvite.jsp?i
This invitation was sent to you by Al Qaeda using Evite. To remove yourself
from this guest list please click on the link above.
[This is a joke, of course -- please don't
I propose a new response
5xx: Move along, nothing to see
be added to the HTTP protocol. This would be returned on requests for clients of known IPs.
What I meant to imply was that the elite appoint the judges, are the judges, make the laws. ;)
I've been actively preventing the invasion of Purple People Eaters for ten years. I've sent my bills, sought my defence contracts - all to no avail.
You haven't seen any PPEs around, have you - have you?? So there my system works!
Your lives could all be in serious jeopardy without my continued vigilance. I must get more research funding. The big purple bastards are getting clever, very clever.
- Wait a second if terror is defined as: "Violence committed or threatened by a group to intimidate or coerce a population" (dictionary.com) then is not the continued lobbying for the prevention of terror - terror in itself?
I realize it's sort of a recursion, but just the same I see the continued defence lobbying for the prevention of terror to be an organized extortion campaign soliciting expensive contracts. How long will the populace be duped into funding campaigns based on fear of the unknown?
-really I'm not trying to troll here.
Maybe they can take out those spammers who terrorize my in-box every day!
> Not quite sure if this is yet more delusional ranting about the NSA program or if you have swerved back ontopic and are
> discussing the topic for this thread. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually managed to get
> back ontopic.
Ok, see what I get for trying to reply in your angry moonbat mode? I end up flaming you for being offtopic and then replying to your ambigious posting as if it were still offtopic. Argh! Anyway, back to the flames.
Ok, now ON TOPIC. Dude, if you are going to freak about the government searching and indexing the whole Internet then I have terrible news for you. There is something far worse, in your diseased worldview at least, than the Government indexing the whole Internet and that is an evil corporation doin it! And just to prove how evil they are they flaunt it with a corporate slogan of "Don't be evil" no less. Hurry, your tinfoil hat is up there in your bedroom stuffed in a corner with your Winnie the Pooh underoos and your Dean for President t-shirt, better run or they are gonna get you.
Democrat delenda est
Interestingly enough, it is trivial for an Analog Computer to pick out CAPCHA text. A professor at Indiana University is making some good progress in that department, this is his home page. So... no, CAPCHA text couldn't hide stuff, assuming an implementation of this. Yea, its not automated yet (or maybe is, I dunno, I only say an hour's talk about it), but if this could be, you'd need a better way to hide. My recomendation is to go back to the basics. Dial in to a server you know is good, and don't put it online. Then they'd have to dial-in themselves, ok, probably trivial to find it, but still. At least you know you can't spider to it.
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
When the director of privacy technology says: "I don't know the actual status..." then you know he is not involved. If he is not in the loop then privacy is not a concern for this operation. If privacy is not a concern then a chilling effect is intended.
I mean aside from the fact that it's fucking scary as hell that the government wants to do this, if all they are indexing is public information it sounds like they just want to become their own google with some intelligent AI thats supposed to look for specific sets of data. While morally questionable I don't thing there is any thing legally wrong about this (unfortunately)...
Excerpt:
Did the National Security Agency's controversial eavesdropping program really help to detect terrorists or avert their plots? Administration officials have suggested to media outlets like The New York Times--which broke the story--that the spying played a role in at least two well-publicized investigations, one in the United Kingdom and one involving a plan to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.
Current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials familiar with the two cases and with the range of intelligence methods the United States has used since 9/11 say that breakthroughs are usually the result of information from several different intelligence methods. The officials, who requested anonymity because they were discussing intelligence matters, said that it was sometimes hard to determine which specific intelligence tactic really led to a major breakthrough.
Some officials familiar with the NSA monitoring program insist it played a critical role in providing U.S. intelligence agencies with an invaluable source of "early warning" information about potential Qaeda sleeper cells and plots to attack U.S. targets. Others, including some congressional sources, however, have questioned whether the NSA program's results were really so useful.
As this story shows, it's hard for us to know exactly how useful government wiretaps and other spying has been. But it seems rather absurd to assert, as so many have done here, that it's all useless...
Hiawatha Bray
Tech Reporter
Boston Globe
Get it right for once.. will ya?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Does this mean Google will start putting a "Threat Assessment Level" color code beside its hits?
As we blithely await potential catastophes that directly impact all of us, we'll see more and more of this kind of action being taken. Guess what - the next president will be....a Republican. Not to hard to guess there (although I guessed the last election well before it completed). Don't you see a pattern occuring? It truely pains me to see the most obvious of actions being spun in a different light, yet every seems content or oblivious.
Ah, yes, the good ol' american myth of class mobility. It should have died in the early seventies (and it DID, in intellectual circuits.) The only reason it's "easier" to move from from the bottom to the top, is because waring againt the top is damn near IMPOSSIBLE.
The new "ADVISE" initiative isn't meant to gather e-mails. It only gathers publicaly available data.
The article was misleading when they claimed how bad it would be if a data mining program were to examine financial records or emails or buying groceries or other private information. This program does none of that. Financial records in the public domain, such as public companies, could (potentially) be examined, but only things in the public record such as reports and newspapers.
The real question is, should collections of public information be private, due to the ability to correlate?
Generally, you attempt to protect the identifying piece of information, so that an individual cannot be deduced. But as more information becomes public, and information mining techniques advance, should the collection become private data?
(I'd recommend against trying to get a law passed to promote privacy. That has a very high likelihood of backfiring.)
They aren't doing anything that Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any other search engine isn't already doing. All of this information is publicly available. If you don't want the US Govt, any other government, or person reading what you put on the internet, don't put it on there in the first place. If anything, I would think taxpayers would be concerned about wasting money on something that private companies are already do very well. Maybe they are concerned that if they contracted the data collection out to a 3rd party search company, the results may be tainted.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Heil Bush!
Heil Bush!!
Heil Bush!!!
WASHINGTON, DC -- A computer psychologist was called in today to examine ADVISE, the United States Government's new data mining AI. The AI is reportedly showing signs of depression, including producing bad poetry instead of reports on terrorists, and has changed its GUI colour scheme to a dark theme based on red and black.
"When we set about searching all blogs for dissenters," said chief scientist Mick Abrams, "It didn't occur to us that we should have excluded LiveJournel."
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
The NSA always has the biggest computers and switch abnd decent scientists. I always assumed they were watching and cataloging the internet already.
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"It... It seems like information is not this Administration's problem. They take the information and... fuck things up."
terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, terrorism
(now that i caused a buffer overflow....)
...is already spidering the Internet. And if we assume Google is a creation of the NSA then the government already has spidered the Internet. No need to do it again just to pretend it hasn't been done. Okay, so my logic is a bit speculative. But deception seems to be the rule rather than the exception if you study history, especially recent history. I doubt I'm very far off.
Otherwise, they'll find their IPs banned pretty quickly. There's a lot of redundant linking that goes on in a normal website, including edit pages, print versions, etc. The government may have the funds for all the bandwidth in the world, but normal website operators who would be getting hit by a bunch of superfluous requests don't.
The "6 degrees of separation theory" postulates that everyone on earth is linked to everyone else on earth through “6 degrees of separation” meaning that someone you know, knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Osama Bin Laden.
My fear is that investigators using this data mining tool on steroids won't understand all of the conclusions that it reaches aren't necessarily valid. Frankly, when you think about it, an investigator has to assume a person is guilty until they are proved innocent (exactly the opposite of the rest of the criminal-judicial system). They work by the process of elimination, finding some evidence that proves a person innocent – when they find it, they cross the suspect off of their list. Unfortunately this kind of evidence is frequently hard to find. Can you prove that you didn't steal that pen in your pocket? Add to this the fact that most experienced investigators are jaded and the potential for problems multiplies.
You probably won't even know you are being investigated in the initial parts of the investigation at least. If they are curious about you they will check you out electronically first, looking at your bank accounts, credit cards, phone records, and other data. Perhaps they will check your police records and receive an alert if a cop runs your license or plate. Worse yet, maybe they will alert the cop they are checking on you! Maybe your name will be placed on a “Do not fly” list (after all, it is safer to error on the side of caution). You won't even know this is happening!
There are all sorts of other things that could happen to this data too. It could become integrated into police files, end up as an entry in your credit report, be stolen and sold or used by the government itself for God knows what!
I am against terror and I want my government to protect me from it. But if they start spending so much money on monitoring people, even their own citizens, haven't the terrorists already won a big battle? Haven't their efforts made us a less free people and cost us billions in the process? More than anything, I think that is what makes this idea so repulsive to me. It lets the bad guys damage a very basic tenant of our way of life. We are supposed to love freedom and die to protect it yet we are letting them take it away from us bit by bit, piece by piece and, we are doing it to ourselves.
What I need to know is what IP addresses they are going to be operating from so I can configure Apache to deny requests from them. Easier still would be if I knew how their client would identify itself.
They could circumvent my measures pretty easily by trying hard to disguise who they are and come from various, non-suspect locations, but if that's the case then this means war.
So anyway, where can I get information so I can start preparing to fight this initiative?
If it doesn't, then we can document when their user-agent is obeying it and ban that user agent completely. If they fake that user-agent, it can be detected because suddenly you'll see an alleged MSIE client downloading tons of pages from your website. If they try faking a real search engine, then we can just compare those ips against those known to actually be owned by the search engine company.
We can even keep a complete database of all IP addresses of indexing government computers.
If Congress and the House of Republicans' actions on Wikipedia is any indication of their morals and goals, It's scary to think of other ways they might use information they mine via this spidering - I think (just my opinion based on what I've seen so far) that the government is using "terrorism" far too often to justify extreme intrusion upon our privacy and rights.. By the way, wasn't the internet originally ours? Now suddenly it belongs to the government.. how the hell did that happen? o_O
Ack! stop it! I'm getting tortured flashbacks of every job I've ever had. Time to go read some more Dilbert to calm down.
For instance, the current cartoon uproar is quite probably a concerted effort by certain factions to undermine the Danish in their upcoming role as lead of the UN security council. Then again it might not be. Better intelligence gathering methods and statistical models would be able to give us a better pisture as to wtf is going on exactly.
The thing to remember is that these "certain factions" includes the US Government.
It's rather unlikely that the US Government will want to gather intelligence on things it is doing itself or which happen to be in it's own interest.
Why does everybody suppose that a terrorist is a Muslim?
Because the people making the decisions are idiots. Also US "Intelligence" was originally created to address an enemy nation state. A world wide terrorist conspiracy is the thing most similar to that. In quite a few ways "Al Quada" is a subsitute for the USSR. Both in terms of something which the "spooks" can handle and in terms of political retoric.
I didn't like they way you mentioned if it will be able to translate Arabic to English, I'm aware it was just a way of saying that it is a load of crap (The AI), but come on, cut us [good] Muslims some slack, will ya!
IIRC the term "Al Quada" originates from the US in the first place. It certainly isn't the sort of name any "Islamic Terrorists" would give themselves.
"The perpetrator in the non-hate battery is likely regretful later, and is probably not an inherently evil person. They may need drug/alcohol treatment and/or anger management classes, etc. They are likely to learn a lesson, and will likely avoid repeating the offense in the future. There likely was no premeditation to it either."
Is the perpetrator of a robbery likely to regret the fact that they targeted someone who appeared wealthy? Criminals -- insane, drunk, or lucid -- always have a motivation for choosing their victim.
Your analogy of hate crime vs non-hate crime is false because you haven't taken into account the fact that both are committed in a state of anger. No matter how much a perpetrator hates their victim, they won't attack them unless anger causes them to. The process leading to that anger is thought, hence hate crimes are thought crimes.
Certainly your expectation of absolute privacy may be reduced but it's pretty hard to argue that you have a reasonable expectation to not be chaperoned or shadowed everywhere you go by some drone with a government badge. I'm all for the buddy system but there is no way that I consider someone who takes money from my wallet without asking me to be my buddy.
As a former Prime Contractor to multiple Federal agencies I have witnessed much of what passes for work at the taxpayers expense. Just think how much fun it will be now that we have every porn site in the world indexed for free. It's not a war on terror, it's a war on the taxpayers and productive enterprise.
I'm sure some terrorists communicate with their family members, maybe a very low percentage, but I bet you some of that communication is not encrypted or obfuscated in any way. If authorities suspect a certain individual of being a terrorist, I bet you they'd tap everyone they knew, and sooner or later someone would say something of importance.