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The ATF Wants To Know Who Your Friends Are
i_want_you_to_throw_ writes "You have a Friend Request from: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms... 'Confirm'? 'Not Now'? Seriously, the ATF won't try to friend you on Facebook. The ATF doesn't just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. According to a recent solicitation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau is looking to buy a 'massive online data repository system' for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information (OSII)."
In a truely free country the ATF would be a convenience store and not a government agency. In a free country you would be able to buy your alcohol, tobacco, firearms AND explosives from an ATF convenience store.
Keep your friends close but keep ATF closer.
AFAIK FB 'friends' in most cases are not exactly what one would consider to be a friend IRL. I mean if you have 1000 friends, what does that mean?
An old tale:
A young man decided to get married, he was busy and asked his father to call 50 people on a list. He said "these are my friends, can you call them and invite them for the wedding ceremony?" The father agreed.
On his wedding day the son confronted his father "I asked you to call all of my friends", "and so I did", "but there were 50 people on my list and I only see 15". "Son, I called all 50 people and told each one of them that you have a problem and you need help and they should meet with you in this exact location at this exact time, so don't worry, all your friends are here now".
Back to the story: of-course government wants to know everything about you, don't you understand, it's for the collective good.
You can't handle the truth.
I propose an open-source decentralized big-data platform for tracking all politicians, their movements, who they talk to, where they've been, they're locations, their correspondence (that's public), their donations, criminal backgrounds, known associations, and everything about them in an easily searchable, index-able manner.
Who wants to work on this with me! Seriously people we could do this in a legal way and that would be something that COULD make a difference. Probably not but worth a try...
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Their goals are ridiculous in free country. A country isn't free if it's government knows what everyone is doing all the time. Besides that, why weren't they asking for this information 10 or 20 years ago? People had connections in the past but the government never sought to know everyone's. The only result of all this total information awareness so far is to find out the CIA Director was having an affair. Billions of dollars could be better spent on infrastructure.
My friends are anyone who upholds the bill of rights. Sounds like that doesn't include anyone in the ATF.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."