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."

Comments

again..

[Pavel Stratil]

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.

Re:again..

[aztec rain god]

I sort of remember a Bill Hicks quote about the War on Drugs that I'm thinking applies to the War on Terrah- "Its not a war on drugs, its a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times".
What this amounts to is tracking thought-crimes, how can you know someone is going to commit a terrorist act until they do it? People say lots of things, people think lots of things. Whither freedom.

Re:again..

[jallen02]

Hate crimes are in essence thought crimes too. Think about it.. hate is a thought. Your reasons for feeling a certain way are thoughts. So in essence you can be subject to more severe penalties purely based on your personal opinions while performing a crime. Not only that you can be convicted of a hate crime alone where your sole criminal act was an expression of hatred for something.

This differs from premeditated murder in that, yes, ultimately, premeditation is a thought.. but the key difference is that you were planning a crime. Planning to kill someone is not an opinion. Hating a group of people is an opinion.

It is basically legislating what sort of motivations for doing a crime is worse than some other motivation. So if you rob a bank because you hate banks should you be subject to stiffer penalties? If you kill a gay man because you hate gays how is that anything other than a murder? Hate crime, for me, goes way to far down the path of thought crime. Double plus bad.

Jeremy

Re:again..

[orthogonal]

This won't help dealing with the terrorists at all.

No, but it'll sure help keep the lid on political dissent, won't it?

Portions of this have already begun: the data mining only extends prior government watching of the web for "terrorists" like the ACLU. But not for political speech, of course. Never that.

So shut your mouth and shut down your blog and stop commenting here if you don't want to end up on a list of people to be "neutralized" -- like Mario Savio, hounded for ten years despite never breaking a law.

Savio's "crime" was, ironically, leading the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. We'd do well to remember today 0Savio's words then:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus. And you've got to make it stop.

Re:again..

[jrp2]

"And why is a murder committed out of hate worse than a "regular" murder? The victim is equally dead either way."

Good question, perhaps this will put it into perspective.

First, let's make this battery instead of murder. Murder is so heinous it is indeed hard to consider a major difference between one derived from "hate" vs. other reasons (being cheated in some way, result of a robbery, etc.). They are both "high crimes" no matter how you measure it, serious punishment will likely occur regardless of the hate component. Battery might be a better crime to illustrate the point, and probably one of the more common uses of hate aggravation (along with vandalism).

A non-hate battery crime usually is an event with some guilt on the part of the victim. Not saying they deserve it, but they probably did something to instigate it (insulted your friend, smashed into your car, etc.). The escalation was likely avoidable by apologizing, running away, or just keeping a cool head about you.

Take a hate-crime battery, and the victim was probably completely innocent, just being black, gay, muslim, etc. and at the wrong place at the wrong time was enough.

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.

The hate-based batterer is generally not regretful, perhaps even proud and satisfied. They will highly likely repeat it, and there is very little a victim can do to avoid it. This is a MUCH more dangerous person, and the punishment (and/or rehabilitation) needs to be much stronger (IMNSHO).

Another situation is a gay neighbor of mine that got burglarized. He came home to find his home burglarized, and "die fags" spray painted on his wall. I have been burglarized, and it was painful and scary, but I did not take it personally and I was not traumatized. I took it as a random, unfortunate, event not directed at me personally. Some druggy looking to finance his next fix. I could definitely see a difference in these situations, my neighbor was totally traumatized, as would I be. I definitely see the crime perpetrated against my neighbor as a far more serious crime than the simple burglary I endured, even though, at their core, they were otherwise similar.

Also be cognizant of other factors that can aggravate criminal sentences, such as recidivism, no remorse, etc. These are along the same lines as hate crime aggravations. They are all an attempt by society to allow for differentiation between one-time mistakes by the offender, and the much more dangerous criminals that will likely repeat and perhaps escalate their crimes. It is just codifying "hate" as an aggravation at the same level as some of the other factors.

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 agree with earlier points, it can be difficult to determine when a crime is hate-based, or not. But in many cases, it is not all that hard. I do agree that assigning "hate crime" status to a crime should not be taken lightly or capricously, and if there is any reasonable doubt, should not be applied. I think (I hope) it is applied very carefully, and sparingly, in real life.

Wrong name

[Z1NG]

Its called Skynet. But it is looking for terorists...like Sarah Conner.

BUSH BOMB WHITE HOUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see how well it works.
Sorry slashdot.

Re:BUSH BOMB WHITE HOUSE

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Lets do a better test of this new system.

I'm gonna shoot some Americans!

Negative. No knock on the door.

I'm gonna blow up the empire state building!

Negative again.

I'm gonna poisen the American food supplies!

Negative yet again. Damn I might as well stop and start downloading some mp3s...

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!

It won't work.

[AltGrendel]

Terrorists already know how to work around this stuff for critical communications. Go low tech. Don't use phones, don't use email, don't use the web. The method that Al Queda uses to get the videos to the media demonstrate that they already have a very good low tech infrastructure to do this.

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 quote that annoys me...

[meringuoid]

Starlight has already helped foil some terror plots, says Jim Thomas, one of its developers and director of the government's new National Visualization Analytics Center in Richland, Wash. He can't elaborate because the cases are classified, he adds. But "there's no question that the technology we've invented here at the lab has been used to protect our freedoms - and that's pretty cool."

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.

Something I've always wondered...

[CptPicard]

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.