Slashdot Mirror
Homeland Security Tests Snoop Computer System
Parallax Blue writes "The Washington Times reports that Homeland Security has developed and is testing a new computer system called ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement) that collects and analyzes personal information on US citizens. Relevant data 'can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.' The program apparently uses the same process as the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness project, which was aborted in 2003 due to privacy concerns."
which was aborted in 2003 due to privacy concerns
If by aborted you mean "renamed, swept under the rug and kept secret this time", yes, it has been "aborted".
Rules for naming projects:
...
1) Choose a word you like. Or better, that the boss/sponsor likes.
2) Reverse engineer an acronym to fit. Sort of.
3)
4) Profit!!!!!
Don't tell me it ain't so.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
But TIA was part of the military. This is for the defense of our homeland, so the trade-off in liberty must be worth it.
Granted, data mining can dig a lot of interesting info out of big databases. But to me, there are two big problems with these type of programs:
1. Guilt by association: When they are doing "linkage analysis" using your phone records etc, how many people will be swept up in the "terrorist" net because they visit the same library as a "terrorist", or got called by accident, or shop at the same Wallmart?
2. Mandate drift: We all know that now it is "the terrorists", soon it will be "the terrorists, the child abusers, the drug dealers, the guys who hit little old ladies, ...". But with the sorts of data mining they are doing, they could just as easily pick out groups of probable (insert political affiliation here). How would you like the FBI showing up at your door because some data mining program thinks that you are probably going to protest a visit to your hometown by the president?
http://infowars.net/articles/march2007/080307TIA.h tm
The part I really love, is their logo. A giant eye of Horus with beams coming out of it encompassing the Earth.
Is it me or does anyone else find that just the slightest bit odd?
Ok, I gave up on the U.S. quite a while ago. If *that* is the freedom you were proclaiming for the last few decade, then let me move to the USSR...oh, you brought them *democracy*...damned! :)
As long as good (old) Europe is free(until you bring us democracy too;) I'll just stick to my side of the atlantic (and the channel).
But seriously, U.S. citizens, aware of their surroundings, must be pretty frustrated by these moves.
Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango
It is done in the USA, Blair then copies the ideas in the UK, then this stuff is harmonized up to EU level as an anti-terrorism measure. So you're not safe from this stuff in Europe either.
e /
There's examples with SWIFT.
SWIFT violated Belgium banking law and EU privacy law, and USA FISA law when it handed all it's data to the NSA & CIA. UK banks were complicit in this, and would also face prosecution.
Instead, the EU Commission took over the case from the Belgiums to 'coordinate the response', and are currently agreeing a treaty to legalize the sending of data to the USA as an anti-terrorism measure. So they're setting Europe up as a satellite nation to the USA.
The UK banks meanwhile, are writing to their customers and changing their banking agreements to make what they did legal:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/07/bank_prob
So now they're making themselves immune when they hand data over to foreign governments.
But now if China wants the EU data from HSBC or Citibank or any other major international bank that operates both in the EU and China, then the bank can simply hand over the data to keep the Chinese happy and their banking terms permit it.
So you are not safe in Europe, as long as people like Blair follow the Bush lead. To prosecute the SWIFT case, either the Belgium prosecutors have to stand up to the USA on their own, of it's handed to the EU, but they can't do anything without unanimous consent, so Blair would block any action to protect Europe's interests.
There is no-one fighting Europe's corner here.
We've got something similar to this, it's called:
Assimilating,Reasoning,
Statistical,
Enhancement,
Highlighting,
Online,
Linkage and
Encryption
Luckily no-one cared about our version as we've already got CCTV everywhere.
Welcome to the surveillance society. Come on in, just don't say anything that might result in your arrest. Things like: 'I'm not too fond of our current administration, I may vote for someone different next time,' are a definite no-no. Just stay on-message, never have anything to hide and you will be fine!
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Did you ever forget to report that extra income you made mawing lawns in that summer, well you hid money from Uncle Sam and you probably used it to fun al-Qaeda which makes you a terrorist.
Did you ever think bad thoughts about the president? Well are definetly a terrorist.
Did you ever use encryption? Only pedophiles and terrorists use encryption so you are probably a terrorist.
Taking all this into consideration, we (the DHS) are offering you a once in a lifetime opportunity to travel. You'll be scheduled on the next flight to Egypt on our luxurious private jets. You'll be viziting old prisons and other historical sites where you'll get to take part in exciting age-old interrogation by torture performances to learn local culture and expand your horizons. Oh and...you'll be the one being interrogated, oh and... it's not a performance. Kthxbi
There is no "consensus" in the tech community about "open" and "privacy". There is one on Slashdot, but I assure you that this is far from the real world situation.
Projects such are these are FUN. They pose a great challenge and you get to shape the system as you wish, as very often the project goals are dictated by people that have no idea how to implement it, so developers dictate the budget and the actual implementation.
Most people get over the ideological technology crap after a certain age.
My Starcraft 2 Blog
Welcome to our 'democracy'.
You cannot control a democratic country by force but you can easily do it with fear and lies. Here is the algorithm:
--Fuck up a country algorithm:--
Input: Country founded on freedom, democracy, individual privacy
Output: Complete government control, 0 rights, 0 privacy
1. Make the people afraid. Could be anything, terrorists, communists, mexicans, chinese, witches etc.
2. Tell them that you can make the fear go away if they just willingly relinquish a little bit of their rights and freedoms.
3. Repeat 3 until no more rights and freedoms remain
4. Done.
>>Most people get over the ideological technology crap after a certain age.
i love this stentence..
as a college student i get something similar where they say "oh you need some 'real world' perspective".
apparently "ideology" stands for having a soul, while "real world perspective" stands for selling it down the river for a quick buck.
i dont know but im really considering remaining poor simply to retain some modicum of morality... maybe start a business building real wood furniture (even major vendors are using particle board now adays)
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
For having so much dead during the blitztkrieg of the german during 1940 and then surrendering when there was no hope of counter attack ? Coward for resisting the foe and making "terrorist" act on german troup and collaborator ? Coward for saying "No" to bush when he attacked a country which had no tie to 9/11 under false pretense of WMD ? Remmemebr the massive citizen protest in those "coward" countries ? Please define coward. Those act took a lot more civic responsabilities than msot of the reaction I saw on the west side of the atlantic against the Patriot act or the war in irak.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
and not to seem like a hyppocrite, but those people really should be hunted down and put into death camps..
one more round of genocide, but this time get rid of the people who actually promote iniquity and genocide themselves..
in this case i really do think 2 wrongs would make a right.
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The question that should be asked about any new piece of anti-terrorism legislation or any anti-terrorism program is simple. If this program was in place before September 11, would it have stopped the catastrophe or made it less serious (e.g. the planes still being hijacked but the world trade centers not actually being hit or collapsing)?
If the answer to this question is NO then the question must be asked, is it worth giving up our civil liberties for a program or law that would not have stopped the terrorists in the first place. And the answer to that should be a resounding NO.
Unfortunately as long as we have politicians who are more willing to listen to a man named after a plant than after the people who voted for them in the first place, we will continue to see anti-terrorism programs and legislation that erode our civil liberties without even doing anything that would have actually had an effect on the September 11 hijackers in the first place.
I would say "thank god I don't live in America" but given that our prime minister will do anything Bush says and then some, we too are seeing all sorts of nasty laws that we don't need and that do nothing to benefit our country or stop terrorism. Thankfully there is an election coming up later this year or so and I can go and do my bit to vote the bastard Howard and his party out of office (I just hope more people follow suit)
This is no different from a supermarket loyalty scheme, except that you can't opt out.
The sooner Homeland Security start offering discount points and a frequent flyer program the better - to reward loyal citizens - otherwise it's just a rip-off.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
While on contract with ABN AMRO several years back, I sat near a team of Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) weenies.
I am not at all exaggerating when I report that the team of four/five spent approximately two full weeks of 7 hour days 'brainstorming' an acronym for the 'Business Process Re-Engineering' project they were working on.
I never did find out what they came up with.
What I don't get about the slashdot community is how articles such as this one lead to pointless, angry rambling, while stories on similarly worrisome developments in foreign countries (think videotaping violence in France, banning of Nazi memorabilia, ...) are usually met with a load of hateful comments on the inferiority of the countries in question. Just take the "America is the freest of all" postings. They could fill books. Most of you people here are from America, so why don't you actually try to take some action against what is wrong in /your/ country? I like America a lot, probably much more so than a lot of people in Europe and other parts of the world do. I just want to point out that it is attitudes such as these that lead to a negative opinion about the US in the first place. Opinion changes quickly, though. I do not believe that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the transatlantic friendship. Just realize that your state is not /inherently/ the best one, but that it takes effort for it to serve as a role-model.
you act as if the statement i made was aimed at republicans.
not to burst your bubble or anything, but it's not about a partisan attack.
there are certain people in this world who will fulfill any morally reprehensible task they are requested (and those people who request them).
these people are pure unmitigated evil and a cancer upon our species, and should be removed.
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Several of you have been asking "could this program have prevented 9/11?". No, absolutely not. Did we all forget that after 9/11 all of the intelligence agencies dug into their records and found all kinds of warning signs and other indicators that 9/11 was going to happen?
Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but the point is they had the intel necessary to predict and prevent this, but it was lost in the noise. What they need is not more electronic noise to sift through (and electronic wild goose chases to go on) but better human intelligence. Grepping through all of the worlds internet traffic and phone records is not nearly as useful as having a single agent embedded with a terrorist group or even paying a couple of informers in the "extremist Muslim" community.
One can reasonably argue that flooding the TLA agencies with this data will make their jobs harder and the overall counter terrorism situation worse. What it will accomplish however is pumping mullions of dollars into the private contractors, while allowing the intelligence agencies to justify raising their budgets and hiring more people to run this program. Which do you think is the real goal?
This is not about catching terrorists OR spying on Americans in an effort to turn us into a 1984 police state. It's about money, plain and simple.
Finkployd
And if you told them to surrender their mouse pads and screen cleaner, doubtless they'd hide those and drag them back out when you weren't looking, too.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
but in reality to get their oil.
Honestly -- lay off the Kool Aid. Take a look at the amount spent on the Iraq war sometime. It's a vast sum; easily enough to have just bought Saddam's cooperation (and let's face it, he was desperate for friends anyway) and all the oil under Iraq.
If you're going to come up with conspiracy theories, at least make them plausible. The "OMG it's blood for oil BLOOD FOR OIL" thing just doesn't fly. If oil had been the goal, it could have just been purchased. It's not like the U.S. has a ethical problem with funding repressive dictators when it suits us.
I'm not really justifying the war per se, but you're going to have to look a little harder if you want to find its root causes. As usual, it's not something that can be rendered down to a three-word slogan. I think in large part, it had to do with the American populace wanting their government to kick the living shit out of some brown-skinned somebody's (and the government only too happy to oblige -- war being a far easier condition to manage than peace), and when the whole thing in Afghanistan didn't look like it was going to go anywhere satisfying in a hurry, Iraq was a convenient target for our collective spleen-venting: it was big, flat, filled with people we either didn't like or didn't care about, and we had good maps from the last time we'd taken a stroll through. Kind of a no-brainer.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You gotta love the Orwellian genius of our darling public servants. Think I'll pen a new law for Congress and the Senate to consider: the Love America And Freedom act. The text of the bill demands immediate impeachment and war crimes trials for the Bush administration. If you disagree with the bill, obviously you hate America and Freedom.
Ask me about my sig!
Congress could stop the war and impeach the president today. Do you wonder why they do not? The Democrats want the war just as much as the Republicans. Beyond making many many negative statements about the presidents handeling of the war to the press can you name one signifiant thing the Democrats have actually done to stop the administration do anything?
"file charges" under the illegal Patriot act and ligitimise it?
People like you piss me off because you know somethings wrong with your country but your entirally ignorant of what it is. The problem is not corprations paying off the Government.. the problem *IS* the Government. Corprations themselves are a fictious entity created by Government regulation on buisness, these immorral, share holder run, money making monsters, wouldnt even exist without government.
Our government is absolutly out of control and is destroying our freedom and ignoring the law to achieve what it thinks is a good idea at the time. Today its the war on terror, tommrow it will be the war on drugs, and the day after that the war on poverty will comence. We need to limit what they can do, we must tell them they do not poessess the athority to grant us rights, they do not posess the athority to control us. Without creating limits on government, it matters very little who is in control of it.
Remember, your government is just other people.. They have no moral right to rule you. A group of people no matter how large can't tell a person what they should be allowed do.. that is for them alone to decide. All they can do is band together for a common defense and protect the peace.. thus that is a governments sole legitimate role.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
It's sickening how often we can reference Orwell nowadays, but that is where we've landed ourselves. Speaking of Orwell, how has history viewed Stalin?
People are going to say "well, if you're doing nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about". As if people have the right to judge me, of course. And that's the problem: who's doing the judging? Just what is "wrong" and "right"? Yes, we know that something that hurts another person is definately wrong, I'm not debating those issues. What I'm debating is someone searching for evidence to support themselves, and using nothing but circumstantial evidence.
For instance, say it's a rape (this is hypothetical). They don't have DNA evidence, but you're a suspect. You didn't do it. Well, hey, look at that, didn't you use your credit card to rent a porno? Or sign up for a porn site? Or make a purchase at an adult novelty store? I guess you really are a pervert...
The thing about this is that yes, that above example has a remote chance of happening, but the fact of the matter is that IT DOES HAVE THAT CHANCE. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, after all. And furthermore, not only could the government use this to build a possible profile against anyone from potential terrorists to potential dissidents (we already consider anyone that calls out against a war or a policy "un-American"), but it could be used as marketing fodder. This brings us much, much closer to - even unofficially - government sanctioned products; think Budweiser can come out with Victory Beer? And if you think this is highly sceptical, remember who got that contract to clean up in Iraq.
It's getting to the point where everything about our lives will be indexed and viewable to anyone that wants to within any reason whatsoever. We are becoming a fascist government with just enough Democracy to fool people into thinking they're in charge. Something needs to be done. NOW.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".