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CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

sociable.co

81–90 of 98 posts

Re: CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll find a lot of false positives, as unfortunately that alert will be sent more than once a week: http://www.killedbypolice.net/ (M/B means Male/Black)

Yes, and what percentage of those killings are actually justified? The police have an inherently dangerous profession.

Justified or not, I still consider those deaths unfortunate.

Re: CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

#82
"In certain sectors such as finance, it can be self-detrimental as in the case of the financial meltdown in 2007-2008. When a predictive system becomes too efficient, it undermines the very foundation upon which it stands.

If you’ve gathered enough wealth and your services are so efficient that their values skyrocket, but there’s no money left for anyone to afford them, then you’ve fallen victim to the seductive power of siren servers."

what the fuck is this author talking about? this is so incoherent. CIA can predict black swan events now and the super computers can accumulate so much wealth that no one can afford it? what is this website? is this satire?

Re: CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that pointing out that an agency can, with investment, have limited, targeted active surveillance isn't really saying anything about what's effective from stopping that same agency from wide-scale, passive surveillance. NGOs (even in the case where you're having their help by carrying scanners around for you) aren't within orders of magnitude of the information collected by the average person carrying a cell-p…

NGOs aren't used by intelligence agencies as a means of boosting signal intelligence, they're used as a means of boosting human intelligence. NGOs tend to have overlapping members and social circles as grassroots organizations. They don't need to gather cell phone signal intelligence, they can just ask their staffers "what do you think of these protests?" Different threat vector entirely.

> Different threat vector entirely.

My point was exactly that it's a different threat to have them have to collect human intelligence from NGOs rather than have every text message, phone call, email, etc from and up-to-the-minute location data on every person they're looking for intel on.

I don't care if the CIA can call up every NGO on the globe and talk to 50 different people there to get 50,000 reports on the current civil unrest across the globe, collate them down in to usable intelligence, and present that to our leaders. That's literally their job. They should do that. Lots of that. All of it they can. (I would be shocked if the CIA didn't already heavily extract intelligence from NGOs.)

It's just a completely different scale from being about to know where every person is minute-by-minute, and everything they say, text, email, read online, etc. forever, to be looked up and cross-referenced whenever you need. Particularly because the conversations with NGOs have to focus on targets of interest, while they can literally just watch every phone and digital transaction. All of them. All the time.

So I'll be blunt: you guys are just wrong that them being able to get any kind of intelligence from NGOs, be it sigint or humint, that would make up for the firehose of digital exchanges being shut down or rendered useless.

Re: CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and what percentage of those killings are actually justified? The police have an inherently dangerous profession.

Justified or not, I still consider those deaths unfortunate.

All lives matter.

Re: CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

#85
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So who gets that money? You support democracy in China and the Communists start an uprising. You support Communists and the other side starts an uprising; someone is always pissed off -- it isn't "government" vs. "the people." It's vastly more complex. Rarely are there two sides -- more like 200. Intelligence is a wilderness of mirrors as James Angleton had said. You could say "end the CIA" but that's sticking one's…

Claiming everything is morally ambiguous and thus we need the CIA, which has real examples of unambiguous harm, seems more like sticking one's head in the sand to me.

This is not a moral issue, ambiguous or not.

CIA and its counterparts elsewhere will be here as long as there are nations. Event if every countries were on friendly terms, which won't happen, there would still be conflicts of interest, and hence the desire to gain the upper hand via intelligence.

Re: CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

#86
I don't see anything too alarming here. Predicting social uprisings 3-5 days in advance is easy, as long as you're happy with a few hundred false positives for every solid hit. Signal-boosting is only useful to the extent that it doesn't equally boost noise.

Besides, I'm quite sure that this other initiative is producing far more actionable data, even if it's hardly breaking news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juQcZO_WnsI (2011)

Re: CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

#87
Or you could just announce you have such a technology and thereby slightly inhibit the organization of uprisings via the Panopticon effect. All for the cost of sending a few emails.

Of course the reason what I say is unlikely is because actually building the system, functional or not, would justify an ever expanding budget.

Re: CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

#88
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the other way round. I lived in Beijing at the time when Americans bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (May 1999). CNN and other Western news channels were showing films of furious Chinese protesters shouting and throwing things at the U.S. embassy buildings in Beijing. This went on for days. When I actually went to the Sanlitun embassy area, the closest thing to a riot was a stout Western woman walking her po…

The Chinese were far from being genuinely offended, they were more than happy with the parts of the spontaneously disassembled F-117A. Probably they even helped to make the new artificial lake afterwards.

What on earth are you talking about?

Re: CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is a behaviour control mechanism. _Other people_ upvote articles and downvote anything they don't like. Therefore ensuring you are forced fed with only articles _they_ like. Your behavior is controlled by all these other people. /s

Sure it is and without sarcasm. Even when you do not post anything here then reading what is posted influences you toward certain target. Perhaps you get more interested in Javascript for example or most probably, startups. The question is not in this. The question is in the scale of the operation and actual spread of the influence.

HN is big and people spend a decent amount of time on it.
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