Bruce Sterling On Total Information Awareness 488
securitas writes "Declan McCullagh interviews Bruce Sterling about Total Information Awareness (renamed Terrorist Information Awareness and raising concerns) or 'Poindexter's nutty scheme' as Sterling thinks of it. He predicts TIA will destabilize the government and lead to internal KGB-style coups. Whether you agree with him or not it makes for thought-provoking reading."
yay (Score:0, Interesting)
my thoughts..... (Score:1, Interesting)
But what the Pentagon expects to get out of the system will be of little use because of the sheer complexity of it all. I think we can all agree that getting everything together and working in a useful manner. note that I said useful, not correctly. It might work "right" but generate little useful info under all the incoming data.
Always a problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
The government is most likely to be able to track transactions that occur digitally, or require storage of information on computers that are not under the control of the individual whose data is being collected. Do you think that it's likely that terrorists will use these means, now that it's been announced that the government is collecting it? I'd think that they're more likely to buy guns from someone who has switched from running drugs into the country to running guns, to contact their fellow agents through 'chance' encounters, and to transact whatever seemingly legitimate business they use either with cash or through legitimate electronic transactions, which will make them blend into the electronic noise just like everyone else. How is this going to help matters?
The government already knows when one buys a new handgun through legitimate channels, through the Brady Law. They already should know about most of those who have explosives experience, since that is usually military training based to begin with, and demolitions companies, mining companies, and anyone else legitimately using explosives has to get their employees licensed. "Cyberterrorism" is an absolute joke of a term as long as easily broken-into OSes like anything Microsoft has ever put out is still in the mainstream and is still being used as a server, and there are probably dozens, if not hundreds of other examples like these.
I don't see how collecting all of this data is going to help.
TIA or NO TIA it will happen anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Data Mining is here. While the Republicans are more astute in the practical applications of tech and the Democrats tend toward the hip useless gadgets, Both sides are gearing up and will be using data mining against each other.
I have always said that KGB agents must have wept when they realised the information your typical marketing or credit card company have on the american citizen.
Poindexter may be a criminal and a boob American Express isnt.
Information Excess (Score:3, Interesting)
If you live in a small enough town, everyone knows everyone elses business...
When you remove the distance that geography or caste once maintained you are left with a very small planet where everyone may not know everyone else...but if they need to they can dig up any amount of dirt on you they want.
TIA is an initial step towards a decentralized type of always on information about anyone you could ever want...
And the only people who will be safe will be those without govt assigned ID (which means no CC's no ID's no Bank statements etc..) and the insanely wealthy...those who can afford to keep their sins a secret.
Much like it would be in a small town.
I hate small towns.
Renaming It Shows What They Think About us (Score:5, Interesting)
Just by renaming it to sound anti-terrorist, are we supposed to shut up and stop questioning it?
Instead of making our government BIGGER & MORE INTRUSIVE & STRIPPING AWAY OUR RIGHTS, why don't we investigate how 9/11 was allowed to happen when we had ALL THE INFO REQUIRED to prevent it?!?!?
Oh, I forgot--the investigation into that was quietly squashed without much media attention but we got color-coded alerts to make us feel that something "real" appropriate is being done.
"Hey, lets rename this unpopular law/project/war/etc. so people think it has to do with anti-terrorism, they'll shut up for sure especially if the media makes anyone speaking against it appear stupid, weak, liberal, unpatriotic, etc. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a bunch of unpopular shit done what would've caused riots/impeachments just a few year ago! Best of all, when people start to ask questions about the Pres or VP dealings with Enron or Halliburton again, we can just change the terror alert color so the media can refocus on that without resorting another murder case in California."
"And just in case we don't have any more terrorism in the USA, lets go piss off the Palestinians and make the Middle-eastern countries think we're gonna invade them--that'll stir up enough shit to make at least another group of crazies blow something up here--and we can milk that bombing to our advantage just like 9/11! We'll be silencing our critics and getting unpopular initiatives done for the next 50 years using this strategy!"
I'm obviously exaggerating to make a point but really, don't you think there's a grain of truth to associating unpopular initiatives with anti-terrorism just to get people to stop questioning it?
Re:To quote the constitution... (Score:2, Interesting)
We just have to wait for a new precedent to be set, overturning bad laws..like the Patriot Act.
Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, that is the type of thing that inspires confidence.
great, like Reality TV 24x7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Man, I suck at google :( (Score:4, Interesting)
10 seconds my ass. I stick in the search terms "bruce sterling", "real name", & "fiction" (after all we need to separate BS the science fiction writer from BS the plumber), I get 390 hits. After glancing through likely pages, I get the real names to a half dozen different writers, but not Bruce! I even go to vivisimo, get some hits unique to google, but still no real name. Man, the New World Order better not depend on my lame ass skills.
Now I know I could track it down if I spent two hours going through search engines, varying search arguments, but what the hell am I doing wrong??? *sigh*
Re:"No longer a guaranteed right"? (Score:3, Interesting)
A clear example, which is of prime relevance, is the fact that the Constitution and Bill of Rights never once use the word "privacy". In fact, there is no attempt to explicitly proscribe a right to privacy, nor a right against government explorations of the individual. In fact, the argument over whether or not the makers of the constitution intended there to be such a right is one of the oldest in American legal debate.
Without getting too detailed, consider the following: all of the arguments for a constitutional right to privacy are based on liberal interpretations of the Bill of Rights, for example the belief that in order for their to BE a right to free speech, there must be sufficient privacy to organize that free speech without social pressure (either from private citizenry or from the government) preventing that speech. Another example is the belief that the right against illegal housing of soldiers in your home implies that your house is somehow "private" despite that it is clearly located within the domain of the government.
Court decisions are, of course, divided about this. Griswold v. Connecticut includes Justice Stewart's dissenting claim that there simply is no right to privacy, but merely the specific rights in the Bill of Rights. He employed this, incidentally, in an argument against protection of abortion. Roe v. Wade, infamously, determines that there is a right to privacy, insofar as a woman's private control of her womb.
In a more contemporary context, laws discussing the legality of sexual behaviors clearly are concerned with the privacy of your home. A certain possible presidential candidate (whom I wont name) made claims that homosexual behavior, if legal, must demand that all sexual behavior done in "privacy" must be legal by paralleling it to bestiality and the ilk. His point, clearly, is that there simply is no right to privacy, insofar as your consentual sexual behavior at home.
To sum up, the right to privacy you're so concerned about isn't explicitly stated in the Constitution or Bill of Rights, despite your request that we only read them literally and without interpretation. Basically, to take a little pun, you've shot yourself in the foot.
Re:Well (Score:2, Interesting)
Relevant or not, here are some of his "recent" predictions [kurzweilai.net].
I like the 2004 one about human cloning.
Didn't some crack-pot group claim this last year? (I'm too lazy to google it)
Re:Read the constitution for your answer (Score:4, Interesting)
You do realize this is the TIA article, right? The very point of the parent article is that we have a good reason to be worried about our government!
If the counterexamples are poor, then your original example - Germany under Hitler - was poor as well. It was just as ready to be controlled by fear as Iraq and Afghanistan were. (btw, Iraq was a very prosperous and stable country before Hussein - so they actually weren't ready to be controlled by fear) Your point remains weak.
As for the ad hominem attack, I'll just ignore it. After all, resorting to logical fallacies is a good sign one's losing an argument.
Re:my thoughts..... (Score:5, Interesting)
A researcher would do well to think carefully about the potential usage before taking any money to work on TIA.
bah, i have no fear of TIA (Score:4, Interesting)
By the time its all over, we'll have Furher Ashcroft annoucing they are searching for a heinous terrorist known as "Heywood jablowme" aka "Al Coholic".
Re: To quote the constitution... (Score:3, Interesting)
Criminals have always been subject to having their constitutional rights curtailed in various ways. For example, they're not allowed to vote. So, is the fact that criminals are not allowed to vote a justification for poll taxes and poll tests and other 'needs of society' reasons to keep people from voting?
Re:"No longer a guaranteed right"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not exactly. From US v. Miller:
In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a âoeshotgun having a barrel of less that eighteen inches in lengthâ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that is use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State, 2 Humphreys (Tenn.) 154, 158.
Aymette v. State actually concerned a concealed knife, not a firearm. Interestingly enough, there was another decision about the same time from either Tennessee or Kentucky that found that a miniature shotgun was a useful weapon for a militia.
And, on top of that, Aymette v. State turned on the presence of the phrase "for the common defense" in the Tennessee Constitution at that time. That particular phrase had been proposed and explicitly rejected by the US Senate during debates on the Bill of Rights. So, even that qualifier is questionable.
We are unable to accept the conclusion of the court below and the challenged judgement must be reversed. The cause will be remanded for further proceedings.
There are two key phrases here: "not within judicial notice" and "remanded for further proceedings". The former phrase means that the Court would not conclude that a sawed-off shotgun was or was not part of the ordinary military equiopment, because no one presented evidence to support it. The reason? It's at the beginning of the decision:
No appearance for appellees.
No one showed up on behalf of the defendants, leaving the US government to present their case unopposed. Had there been even a semi-competent defense, it would have been a non-issue, because the US Army was using sawed-off shotguns as late as the Vietnam conflict. They were common in the trench warfare of WWI, which preceded this decision in 1939.
That brings us to the latter phrase: "remanded for further proceedings". The case was supposed to go back to the lower court to determine if the firearm in question did indeed meet the criteria established by the court. But by this time, Miller was dead (under suspicious circumstances) and apparently the US Attorney quickly cut a deal with his co-defendant, Frank Layton, to avoid the embarrassment of having the conviction thrown out after an evidentiary hearing.
So, while US v. Miller did indeed set the criteria for restricting ownership of certain weapons, the criteria very clearly permits the firearms that the government now prohibits.
An honest reading of US v. Miller doesn't yield the interpretation that most attribute to it.
The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism (Score:5, Interesting)
If you accept the premise of the article, I don't think there's any doubt that we're close to fascism today. It's still early and we could reverse course in less than 18 months. But I think there's little doubt that history will observe that the US came close to losing WW-II 60 years after the fact.
I'm also sure that many of these people have no idea that they're fascist. Hitler was not Satan incarnate, Nazi Germany did not come into existence overnight, and we must always be on guard against history repeating.
As for the OP's uninformed comments, the proper description for the countries he described as "socialist" is "authoritarian" -- and there's no doubt that this country is shifting towards authoritarism in addition to fascism.
Re:Read the constitution for your answer (Score:2, Interesting)
Hardly a conspriacy theory... (Score:3, Interesting)
In case you missed it, the US basically said (at least everybody outside the US read it so) that either you're with us, or you're against us in the war against terror. And of course everybody that is against us is terrorists or supporting terrorism, and must be neutralized. Hence, it's not over until all are with the US, either through military force or just falling into line either by carrot or stick.
It's funny how that when one man seeks to control all other men, you call it a dictatorship. When one country seeks to control all other countries, it's "politics". What's the next country that doesn't fall into line, where GWB will find imaginary WMDs?
They went from finding WMDs, to liberating the people, to ensuring that the Iraqi oil would be used for the people. After the oil has paid for all the damages the war caused, and the profit margins of all the US corportations set to administer it, I'm sure the people will get a cut too, assuming they become good little economic pawns of the US.
That has been what the US has been so good at, to attract more bees with honey than with vinegar. Nothing has sold the "American Way" as well as economic prosperity. Compared to communism, it wasn't exactly a bad sell on freedom either. Now, however, people have started to realize that the economic bonds to the US also can act as a leash, not the military kind that the Soviet Union kept but a leash none the less.
Kjella
Re:Expanding on that... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, that's the funny thing. Someone did say impeachment.
CNN, in an article from (IIRC) Findlaw. Two days ago. They're the only American media company I've seen even mention the word, but they did mention it... And though the article was seeded with the "well, I am sure our troops will find WMDs, please don't let the men with black helecopters come and take me away to Cuba" CYA phrases, it was pretty clear that the writer not only thought Bush had lied, but that there was a decent chance he might be called on it.
T.I.A. = Totally Ignorant Acceptance (Score:3, Interesting)
Government Surveillance
Why do government have no respect for your right to privacy?
Liberty has to be one of the most important things in life. Well up there, behind health and safety of your family, must be the right to go about your daily life without being forced to live it under oppressive surveillance. For it surely is oppression - being spied upon by the authorities in all that you do. Knowing this information could be used against you, for any purpose they see fit. The so-called all-seeing eye of God over you - meant to instil respect of them and fear of authority.
It can be proven they use propaganda to deceive you into believing them. How?
Ask Security Services in the US, UK, Indonesia (Bali) or anywhere for that matter, to deny this:
Internet surveillance, using Echelon, Carnivore or back doors in encryption, will not stop terrorists communicating by other means - most especially face to face or personal courier.
Terrorists will have to do that, or they will be caught!
Perhaps using mobile when absolutely essential, saying - Meet you in the pub Monday (meaning, human bomb to target A), or Tuesday (target B) or Sunday (abort).
The Internet has become a tool for government to snoop on their people - 24/7.
The terrorism argument is a dummy - total bull*.
INTERNET SURVEILLANCE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO STOP TERRORISTS - THAT IS SPIN AND PROPAGANDA
This propaganda is for several reasons, including: a) making you feel safer b) to say the government are doing something and c) the more malicious motive of privacy invasion.
Government say about surveillance - you've nothing to fear - if you are not breaking the law
This argument is made to pressure people into acquiescence - else appear guilty of hiding something illegal.
It does not address the real reason why they want this information (which they will deny) - they want a surveillance society.
They wish to invade your basic human right to privacy. This is like having somebody watching everything you do - all your personal thoughts, hopes and fears will be open to them.
This is everything - including phone calls and interactive TV. Quote from ZDNET [zdnet.com]: Whether you're just accessing a Web site, placing a phone call, watching TV or developing a Web service, sometime in the not to distant future, virtually all such transactions will converge around Internet protocols.
Why should I worry? I do not care if they know what I do in my own home, you may foolishly say. Or, just as dumbly, They will not be interested in anything I do.
This information will be held about you until the authorities need it for anything at all. Like, for example, here in UK when government looked for dirt on individuals of Paddington crash survivors group. It was led by badly injured Pam Warren. She had over 20 operations after the 1999 rail crash (which killed 31 and injured many).
This group had fought for better and safer railways - all by legal means. By all accounts a group of fine outstanding people - with good intent.
So what was their crime, to deserve this
TIA vs. RIAA (Score:1, Interesting)
junk. Just as they inject junk content into the
P2P networks, people can inject junk information
about themselves into the information streams
"trawled" by TIA...
Re:"No longer a guaranteed right"? (Score:1, Interesting)
He goes on to say that because previously courts did not address the Ninth, it can't include a right to privacy; because it doesn't say exactly where it applies, it applies nowhere. It is not a "liberal interpretation" to say that the 9th and 10th try (futilely) to prevent "power creep" by the Federal and State gov't. And he says it was not the Founders' intent that the Federal Gov't must protect the rights of Americans from violations by their own State. We fought a war over that one, 150 years ago.
The Founders' intent was that we wouldn't have a government (Fed, State, or local) that meddled in our business. The state jailing me for buying a condom is meddling in my business.
Personally, I think that if you even suspect the 9th and 10th Amendments apply to a matter, they do. They pertain directly to the heart of our society, enumerated powers and limited government.
"The Court also quotes the Ninth Amendment, and my Brother GOLDBERG's concurring opinion relies heavily upon it. But to say that the Ninth Amendment has anything to do with this case is to turn somersaults with history. The Ninth Amendment, like its companion the Tenth, which this Court held 'states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered,' United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100, 124, 61 S.Ct. 451, 462, 85 L.Ed. 609, was framed by James Madison and adopted by the States simply to make clear that the adoption of the Bill of Rights did not alter the plan that *530 the Federal Government was to be a government of express and limited powers, and that all rights and powers not delegated to it were retained by the people and the individual States. Until today no member of this Court has ever suggested that the Ninth Amendment meant anything else, and the idea that a federal court could ever use the Ninth Amendment to annul a law passed by the elected representatives of the people of the State of Connecticut would have caused James Madison no little wonder."
http://www.abortionfacts.com/court_case