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Total Information Awareness still Running
gordm writes "National Journal reports that, instead of being shut down 2 years ago, the Total Information Awareness program is still datamining away. Must be effective. What else could explain Morrissey's latest adventure?" Just posting this story probably puts me on their radar.
Inch by inch, we're getting closer to living in a massive panopticon.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
If black projects cant get funding in public view, they work behind the scenes and find money elsewhere.
the tinfoil hat was a GOOD idea!!!!
I leave you with the wisdom of Mr. Eisenhower from 1961.
I wouldnt be suprised if at some point the government will start selling off 'de-classifed' data to the highest bidder. Such as what kind of socks you buy.. or your food habits..
the rest of the data ( like your friends, or what street corner you stopped too long at last saturday at 12am ) wont be sold off. Instead it will be used against you when your turn to be directly invesigated comes. Remember, we are all criminals to 'the system'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
come on now... something this "good" was never gonna die
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I have wrote on subject of the Surveillance Society many times - including here on Slashdot.
d =8554109
e.g. this is snippet from one post:
Quote from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: "The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists -- and decipher their plans -- and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts."
The declared GOAL is to, quote: "identify foreign terrorists" - what rubbish. They know you are American citizen, not even a suspect foreigner - yet want to know what you buy, where you travel - everything. They want to profile you, like a criminal. I find it hard to believe that U.S. politicians are that dumb to go along with this violation of the American Peoples Rights. Looks like TIA initials stand for Totally Ignorant Acceptance (for their propaganda).
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=100317&ci
Morrissey is involved with this, too?? How does he find time between cutting albums?
GITI - Global Infotek - is the company still in control of a lot of this tech.
http://www.globalinfotek.com/
when I was working there a few years ago they had a half dozen projects that they specifically told me were the next iteration of TIA, and that TIA had not been shut down, but simply renamed and split up.
I didn't have a security clearance, and nothing they said was confidential, but they threatened my job if I told anyone about it while I was there. Needless to say, I left fairly quickly.
Over a period of decades, the U.S. government paid to kill Arabs and interfere with their politics. The U.S. government also paid to train Arabs in terrorism to fight in Afghanistan.
Is it surprising that a small percentage of Arabs eventually decided to react to violence with more violence? Is it surprising that Arabs don't like being killed?
Now, those who wanted violence have what they want. They can claim that there is a threat, and can make billions in largely hidden contracts for weapons and contracts for war.
The U.S. government is more corrupt now than ever before. Here are some short reviews of books about the corruption. The article is old and needs revision and additions, but gives a small view of a very extensive subject: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War Two and former U.S. President General Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a famous speech that we should beware of the "military-industrial complex". Here's a quote:
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."
Another quote:
"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded."
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
I wonder if Alberto Gonzales had a hand in naming Total Information Awareness. In the small town where I grew up, Tias knew everything going on, the comings and goings, motivations, credit balances and who was seeing who.
The danger with TIA, as with any collection of information with or without the consent of the subjects of the information, is that the power will eventually fall into the hands of someone who will abuse it. Not "might", not "will unless we're careful" -- WILL, as inevitably and certainly as death. The failure to understand this certainty is what enables this kind of creeping infringement of power. Every generation thinks that it has the savvy and the tools to prevent the abuses -- when in reality prevention of abuse is impossible.
/.'ers -- The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist -- apply to more than just the "military-industrial complex". Any power will be "misplaced" as soon as just one unethical person gets his hands on it.
Eisenhower's words, quoted by several other
The only way to limit (not prevent) abuses is to severely curtail the amount of power out there to be abused.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
bomb bomb allah president kill bush cheney islam iraq bomb nuke nuclear batmobile taliban saddam osama afghanistan nuke china nuke bomb allah terrorist wtc
Looking into the US from a long way off, articles like this consistently give the impression that the US is out of control; at least out of the control or ordinary hard working citizens. What has happened to accountability? How does the average citizen take a stand and agitate for real change if it takes umpteen million dollars or ownership of a great chunk of popular media to get elected to office?
How far from the ideal can you go and still call it a democracy? Maybe you still get to vote (If you are willing to stand in line for hours on end on polling day, and you haven't been taken off the electoral roll by your political opponents for some unknown reason) but if the political establishment has pre-filtered or sanitised or heavily biased (with little regard for impartial analysis of the facts) all the information available to help you make your choice can you still claim to be making an informed choice?
If the practical realities of electioneering mean you only get to choose from those with very large bank balances, can you really claim ultimate political authority still comes from the people? If only the very rich can stand for office with any expectation of being elected, don't they have considerably more political authority than the average citizen?
While the US does still sometimes present a shining beacon for the world, it increasingly looks dimmer and less frequent. The darker episodes also seem to be more frequent. With luck, this will come to be seen as an aberration, but from where I stand I don't like the downward direction the US looks to be heading in.
What doesn't make sense is how this is tied to "Total Information Awareness". It sounds from the link that the only information they had was his public statements, not any information gained from spying of any type. Oh sorry forgot that facts arn't supposed to get in the way of any good scare stories.
With all the other stories that've been breaking in the past few months of the NSA wholesale spying on American civilians, the real news here isn't just that the TIA is around. It's that the Senate ordered it shut down, and it wasn't.
Lets look at the past couple of years. The Executive branch has claimed the powers to: declare people including American citizens "enemy combatants" and hold them incommunicado overseas for however long they wish with no access to the US court system, wiretap American citizens within the United States without a court order or indeed any judicial review. Recently the Vice President has also claimed to power to unilaterally declassify anything that he wants.
The CIA has been caught running torture flights through allied countries without their apparent knowledge, running secret prisons in EU member states without EU knowledge, and to top it off, they were caught kidnapping people on the streets of Milan without the knowledge of the Italian government.
The Pentagon, the FBI and the California National Guard have all been caught spying on peaceful protesters on American soil, in spite of a law that specifically forbids this.
A few months ago... Congress passed a law banning torture. The President grudgingly signed this into law, but reiterated his belief that he wasn't personally bound by the ban.
Now we find out that while the Senate ordered a domestic surveillance operation shut down years ago because it was a threat to the privacy of the average American... the Executive branch has decided to keep it going anyhow, without anyone's knowledge.
What's the point of even having a Legislative or Judicial branch anymore? They have no real powers at this point.
The Executive branch can just arbitrarily declare people outside the judicial branch's jurisdiction to keep them out of the courts, and the whole notion of getting a court order for federal law enforcement action is now considered "obsolete".
The Legislature still theoretically gets to pass laws, but the executive branch can basically break them at will... and since the power of enforcing those laws falls within the executive branch's domain, is it any wonder that all these overt violations of the laws of Congress never amount to any meaningful charges?
In fact, we don't even know how far the executive branch's power goes at this point... nobody new the President had the power to wiretap without warrants. The Constitution never mentions it... in fact, federal law specifically prohibits it. Indeed, when the press first found out about this power, they were pressured to keep it a secret (which they did for over a year), and when the existance of this power was revealed to thew general public, members of the executive branch denounced the revelation of the power itself as unlawful.
What the heck. Ridicule or not, I'll take /. as the forum to say that I'm an outspoken person against the current government on blogs and reveal that I have had the "Philip K. Dick experience".
/.ers probably know, PKD wasn't in a good state when he died. He said that his house was ransacked and, although he said he didn't know who did it, he suspected the FBI or local sheriff. Some people think he might have done it himself at that point in his life.
As a large percentage of
You have to visualize my apartment storage. Since I hoard books and some amateur radio equipment, it is much like a solid 8x8x6 cube of heavy boxes. One night I got broken into and _every_ box inspected. Other building occupants were coming down over the HOURS I was repacking and marveling how my stuff had exploded into the aisles of the space.
Yet, here's the thing. As far as I can tell, NOTHING and I emphasize NOTHING was taken. Screw the amateur radio equipment -- where are you going to hock an old HF transceiver quietly? But it seems to me if I were some young punk(s) who went to that much trouble I would have either taken something like the window air conditioner, the few 1950s comic books, or the like for slight compensation of the night or maybe just destroyed some stuff out of anger and frustration.
The local police station told me, "Nothing stolen or destroyed, no crime." So who has that discipline? Maybe info thieves looking for cancelled checks and credit cards (_old_ ones in my storage space?) or someone else who wanted to know who I was and what I was holding. You give me your guess who you think that would be.
If nothing else, when a government demonstrates that it thinks it can make and break the law and work in the dark, paranoia is going to rise. That's not necessarily a bad attitude for a citizen either but, then, when is enough enough? The first casualty of a lawless government is peace of mind.
The article, a troll, was posted to Slashdot, as others are to other forums, to elicit responses that can be added to the secret data bases and correlated with the user's email, other postings, cell phone calls, etc. with the idea of fingering anyone who is disloyal (to the present regime at least). If it's determined that the person is not a security threat he or she can be picked up for questioning (intimidation) or other intimidating actions taken. Or if there might, possibly, be a threat sterner methods may be in store.
Ah, this couldn't be true, I need my morning coffee. Wait who's at the door at this hour?
Nate
Nate
Unaware of the 4th Amendment
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
So you say that the citizens of the united states should shut up, bend over and calmly take what's coming their way?
I find it very sad indeed that the apologists for the current administration don't even refute the fact that the nation is becoming a totalitarian regime. Instead they just tell dissidents to shut up or face the consequences.
Did you really believe that they would ever voluntarily slow the march toward a complete surveillance society where everything that you buy, everywhere you go and even every conversation that you have is ruthlessly cataloged by the state. This is why they are pushing the RFID chips in products, the RFID chips in people, the cashless society, the national ID card (see HR418, the "Real ID" act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.418 : ), the NSA domestic spying, and the patriot act.
Did you know that under the PATRIOT act (HR3162 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:h.r.0 3162: ) all of your property can be seized and the burden will be on you to prove that you are not a terrorist so that you can get your property back. What is the definition of a terrorist? Under section 802 of the PATRIOT act, a terrorist is anyone who is involved in "dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State" is a terrorist. So literally if you jay-walk you are a terrorist. Any one of us is in danger of being declared a terrorist at any time. When the government considers its entire population to be the enemy there is a term for that -- a police state.
None of this stuff is a coincidence. Start getting informed about this stuff so that you know how to protect yourself.
1) I believe the language most commonly used is that they "are becoming" fascist states. This imples that the speaker is making a point in order to prevent a complete transition to fascism or totalitarianism from occurring. Surely you think this is a nice aim?
2) Critics are being silenced, hassled, and pressured, and yes are even disappearing and it would seem being tortured. So you have made their point for them: if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is likely a duck. And the United States in particular is behaving precisely as a fledgling totalitarian state might be expected to behave.
3) Neither in China nor in the former Soviet Union would you necessarily disappear if you merely spoke against the government, though you might. You may just as easily, however, have disappeared or more likely, been arrested and charged with some cover crime and imprisoned or had your livelihood ruined and your personal life destroyed if anyone actually listened to your speaking and took it to be serious and public-minded. That is precisely the state of state of affairs in the U.S. right now.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Roe Vs Wade affirmed a right to privacy in our constitution. Maybe we should stand up for our right to privacy before Roe Vs Wade gets overturned.
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FTA:
We will be describing this new effort as "Basketball"
Basketball??? Does this remind anyone else of Rumsfeld's assertion that we should no longer refer to the insurgents as "insurgents?" And the subsequent joke that W. would rename the deficit "cake." Because, really, who doesn't like cake?
It's as though Orwell suddenly took an absurd turn... next, we'll see the Department of Tennis, the Department of Impressionist Paintings, &c. &c.; the former will run Guantanamo Bay, the latter, Abu Ghraib.
Yeah, I voted for GWB because he said some of the right things. He said it was wrong that the Federal Government, in a time of peace, was taking in as much of the GDP as it did in WWII. He also thought the Federal Government was too invasive and should be scaled back. How clever of him to have justified it all with endless warfare in a few short years.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
We simply can not pay for domain experts to be teaching our kids, even if the cost wouldn't skyrocket as demand went up. Swiping such experts from industry would cause serious problems for industry, so there goes the economy. Besides, most of these people don't have the patience and clarity required to teach well.
We have 2 serious obstacles:
1. The teacher's union blocks reform. It would be great if we could reward teachers who make students learn. Instead, we reward teachers for years of experience.
2. Normal and dim-witted people don't like seeing most of the money go to where it will do the most good. Bright kids are bored out of their mind while the teacher struggles to control the idiots. We can't give special treatment to the bright kids, kick out the dumb kids, or effectively punish the troublemakers.
"While there may be something to criticise in this program (part of which was able to spot the 9-11 terrorists before the act, but was prohibited from using the information), the response on /. is so automatic as to make it painful."
... everything he eats, etc. Having good intentions doesn't always translate to sound actions to that end.
... we have carefully considered it ... thus the posts. The fact that there is a general concensus should clue you in to the fact that many people, much more informed, educated, and smarter than you, understand the issue and universally agree that this is a BadThing(tm.)
... I see where you are going with this. It's like the Copernicus slant on reality. Everyone agrees that the Earth is round and revolves around the sun. This indicates that people have not thought about it very well, and it would be much better if half the population of Slashdot would contend that it is Flat and stationary ;-)
... how will we solve this problem? OH! I have an idea! Maybe we can invent some sort of system of checks and balances! Nah ... forget it. That will never work, and besides that is exactly what terrorists are trying to get to happen. They would not be happy if they knew we had systems in place to check abuse of
There was already a report in the White House containing all necessary information. It was ignored because there was already too much information through which to sift. Slashdot is frequented by a lot of well educated people who understand technology. They are aware of how it can be beneficial, and how it can be abused. They also understand goverment enough to know what about the system of checks and balances, what principles were conveyed by the founding fathers when they penned the US constitution, and how far off track today's government is from what those in power claim it is.
"Does anyone out there ever consider that there might be people in government that might actually be trying to protect us? Does anyone consider that some programs are not as bad as described in the main stream press (i.e. spying on international phone calls to terrorist suspects has been morphed into "wholesale domestic wiretaps")?"
We have little doubt that many are trying to protect us. One way to protect a child is to lock him in a cellar and control his every move
"Has anyone considered that liberty can never be absolute in a world of real human beings, and that the issue is not *whether* you give up some privacy, but *when* giving it up is appropriate and when it is not?
Yes
"I'd just like to see a slight bit of balance here. The monotone is becoming boring."
Oh
"Ben Franklin's quote about protection and liberty is absolutist, and he himself, by being involved in a government which provided protection at the cost of liberty proved that, so please don't raise that old quote as a response."
If you knew what the definition of proof was, you probably wouldn't have an issue with the quote, and I am certain you would understand the problem. A pedophile may claim that the Earth is spherical. The fact that he is a pedophile does not prove that the earth is flat. Your logic fails you.
"Yes, the measures might be abused. The same logic applies to all government powers - so the simple assertion that they may be abused and therefore are wrong is without value. It applies just as well to prosecutors, police departments and DOD. An argument based on this assertion has to be a lot more specific - it needs to show the cost of the abuses vs the cost of not implementing the program, or make an alternative recommendation."
So in other words, it applies to members of the executive branch, members of the executive branch, and memebers of the executive branch. Hmmm
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Does anyone out there ever consider that there might be people in government that might actually be trying to protect us?
No, not really. Having worked for government I'd say I have a better chance of winning the lottery than for your (rhetorical) question to ever be answered in the affirmative.
Ben Franklin's quote about protection and liberty is absolutist, and he himself, by being involved in a government which provided protection at the cost of liberty proved that, so please don't raise that old quote as a response
If by "absolutist" you mean "perfectly correct" then I guess so. But I gather that for some strange reason you actually think that you're the intellectual equal of ol' Ben, something I find about as likely as the idea of the NSA spying on me 'for my own good'.
Has anyone considered that liberty can never be absolute in a world of real human beings
Geez, I don't remember anyone talking about 'absolute liberty'. That little strawman you made up all on your own. What I do remember is our Founding Fathers drawing a line in the sand for government and saying "thou shalt not cross - EVER!"
Too fucking bad the whole experiment didn't work out.
Yes, the measures might be abused
No, they *will* be abused. That's a given. The solution is to make government as weak as possible while still having enough power to do the job it's tasked to do. That way WHEN someone abuses power, they'll never have enough to do more than local harm, and certainly not enough to cover up the abuse or to flaunt it (aka Bush and spying) without fear of retaliation.
For a representative government to be truly representative, you need your Congresscritters to constantly fear what will be done to them should they ever cross the people they represent. Not only that, but regular and firm reminders that they are not leaders, but SERVANTS. They are in Congress for one and only one purpose: to do our bidding, within the constraints of the Constitution. They have no other value in office.
If it were not for some perhaps over-zealous protections enacted by civil libertarian fundamentalists, the World Trade Center towers might still be standing.
What a crock of shit. Yep, let's blame the destruction of the Twin Towers on people who actually *champion liberty* instead of, well, *the criminal fucks who crashed the planes into them*. Your inability to exercise even the basics of logic would astound me if I weren't a Slashdot semi-regular.
Look, if you're so fucking convinced that fascism is such a dandy thing there are countries *all over the world* that would fit the bill perfectly. You'd be much, much happier living in one of them. I'd be happier if you were living in one of them, too.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?