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Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

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Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but you have gone off on a tangent there. We weren't arguing about the effectiveness of the policy just the rationale behind it, I believe. I don't have any stats on that, do you?

You were never arguing. You were being educated.

[deleted]

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#132
post #126
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about this often too. I think the answer ultimately lies somewhere in the realm of "history is cyclical." A society's collective memory seems to fade after a few hundred years. America today is an excellent example of that. The founders came from a time of tyranny and oppression, and worked hard to try to prevent that in their new country. And yet a lot of how our government today works is, I imagine, very mu…

A society's collective memory seems to fade after a few hundred years. A few hundred years? Try a few decades. In the 1940s, the USA fought totalitarianism. Then we had a major fight against Communism. In both struggles, a major part of our self image is that we, unlike the totalitarian states we struggled against, were a free country. If, in a movie in the 70s, you saw the German officer saying, "Papers, please", th…

A few decades is spot on. The Bush era lies/media complicity to march us into Iraq were eerily reminiscent of the Gulf of Tonkin lie LBJ used to get us into Vietnam. It was so obvious to me. One of the things that spooked me out is that anyone who challenged the prevailing push to war was marked "unpatriotic" and "unamerican". Shut up and support our troops. I thought such sentiment could never take root in a country that had even the slightest clue about 20th century totalitarian history, particularly with regard to 1930s Europe.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#133
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tony Blair I'd say. Not Tony Benn's sort of thing at all!

Like most politicians, Tony Benn changed with time. Although in the unlikely way: the other way around . Tony Blair wasn't around Nassau (Trident, the successor to Polaris, was signed off by Thatcher, and it also precedes Blair). youtu.be/rokTiJfL4WY

Sorry, I was about as wrong as is possible!

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#134

Why I'm worried about a surveillance state? Because the people in charge will have their records protected while everyone else gets the surveillance. Our president committed crimes his justice department jails people for (illegal drugs). Drug testing is a perfect example of the surveillance state. The people who don't get tested? The testers. The legislators. The people in charge. I know there are technical problems…

Case in point - the uk "contactpoint" database - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ContactPoint - a database mandated by MPs that should contains all information about every child under the age of 18. Anyone excluded? Yep you guessed it - MP's children.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#136

> using “predictive pattern-matching,” to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior Here we are again : authoritarianism being rationalized.

Speaking of:

> some information "might seem more relevant later," says Mr. Joel

So, hindsight is 20/20, you say?

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#137
Since the predictive algorithms in use mostly come down to glorified dot products, I question their general validity.

Sure, it works sometimes, but just look at some of the wacky stuff Amazon, Google, and Netflix derive from such things. Now replace search results and product recommendations with waterboarding and extraordinary rendition based on the results of those dot products and hilarity ensues...

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#138
post #122

They're probably using Palantir. I wonder how Thiel resolves his libertarian/freedom philosophy with supplying the government with such a powerful oppressive tool.

Well there is also this company https://www.recordedfuture.com/ which has the CIA and Google as investors, like anything political the grey area covers a lot.

"We constantly collect news, blogs, and public social media. We identify the events: past, present, and future. We help you find predictive signals in the noise of the web."

sounds like...anyone doing information extraction or sentiment analysis from the web? If investment is the only thing to raise a red flag, you have to worry about a lot more companies than that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel#Investments

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#139

Since the predictive algorithms in use mostly come down to glorified dot products, I question their general validity. Sure, it works sometimes, but just look at some of the wacky stuff Amazon, Google, and Netflix derive from such things. Now replace search results and product recommendations with waterboarding and extraordinary rendition based on the results of those dot products and hilarity ensues...

And those dot products come down to glorified FMUL and FADD machine instructions! Specious reductionism goes all the way down.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#140

They're probably using Palantir. I wonder how Thiel resolves his libertarian/freedom philosophy with supplying the government with such a powerful oppressive tool.

I had a chance to speak to one of the lead developers at Palantir a couple years back, and asked him about this apparent conflict of political ideals.

His answer: by enabling agencies to properly apply the data they already have, Palantir's products reduce the pressure to further erode civil liberties in the pursuit of more data.

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