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Privacy Government United States Politics

U.S. Gov To Spider Internet 436

Posted by Zonk from the dog-house-farm-house-chicken-house-outhouse dept.
HopeSeekr of xMule writes "Perhaps as one of the first high profile uses of Alexa's WebSearch Platform, the U.S. government plans to search, link and reference every news site, blog and email on the Internet, using sophisticated AI codenamed ADVISE to do the correlations. Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their motivations in wanting to commit their crimes. Part of the breakthrough is a way for humans to view data as 3D holographic images with tech recently used at the Superbowl."
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U.S. Gov To Spider Internet More

U.S. Gov To Spider Internet

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  • again.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pavel Stratil ( 950257 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @09:57AM (#14677022) Homepage Journal
    This won't help dealing with the terrorists at all.
    What if they communicate via

    - plain old websites/ftps
    - internet storage servers, irc, etc?
    - instant messangers
    - VoIP
    - decentralised networks?

    Lets not forget that they can

    - obsfucate.. simplest method would be typing stuff into a CAPCHA-like image. OCR has no chance...
    - use slang
    - encrypt!

    It will end up as an intrusion to the privacy of ordinary people unaware of this and/or private communications among companies.
    • You pretty much mirrored what I came here to comment as well. Totally agreeing here.

    • Re:again.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by aztec rain god ( 827341 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:06AM (#14677121)
      I sort of remember a Bill Hicks quote about the War on Drugs that I'm thinking applies to the War on Terrah- "Its not a war on drugs, its a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times".
      What this amounts to is tracking thought-crimes, how can you know someone is going to commit a terrorist act until they do it? People say lots of things, people think lots of things. Whither freedom.

      • Re:again.. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jallen02 ( 124384 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:26AM (#14677312) Homepage Journal
        Hate crimes are in essence thought crimes too. Think about it.. hate is a thought. Your reasons for feeling a certain way are thoughts. So in essence you can be subject to more severe penalties purely based on your personal opinions while performing a crime. Not only that you can be convicted of a hate crime alone where your sole criminal act was an expression of hatred for something.

        This differs from premeditated murder in that, yes, ultimately, premeditation is a thought.. but the key difference is that you were planning a crime. Planning to kill someone is not an opinion. Hating a group of people is an opinion.

        It is basically legislating what sort of motivations for doing a crime is worse than some other motivation. So if you rob a bank because you hate banks should you be subject to stiffer penalties? If you kill a gay man because you hate gays how is that anything other than a murder? Hate crime, for me, goes way to far down the path of thought crime. Double plus bad.

        Jeremy
        • Exactly, and if you kill a gay man, how do they determine that you killed him because you hate gay people. Even if they could prove that you hate gay people, I think they'd have a hard time proving that you killed him because he was gay. Or is everyone who kills a gay person guilty of a hate crime. Actually, all murders are hate crimes. If you didn't hate the person, why would you kill them? is there a list of reasons that actually fall into hate crime? And would a gay person killing a straight person be
          • If you didn't hate the person, why would you kill them?

            Because you were paid to do so?
          • I don't either. It is just that crimes against gays and blacks are the vast majority of what get classified as hate crimes so you have to talk about the issues as they exist or you can get lost in metaphors.
             
            Jeremy

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:again.. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @11:19AM (#14678058) Homepage
          If you kill a gay man because you hate gays how is that anything other than a murder?

          If the purpose of your murder is to incite fear and terror in all gay people, then yes. It is far beyond a death threat - a criminal offense in itself - you've already gone through with it, the only question is who's next. Multiply that with the number of people you've threatened and we can easily put you away for good.

          Hate thought isn't illegal, any more than other thoughts. What is pure hate crimes would have been called slander, libel, threats and more if they were done against an individual. You can't treat gays as inferior to straight people without treating a single gay man as inferior to a single straught man. Where does that leave your "All men are created equal..."? That it's okay as long as you insult many enough at once?

        • Re:again.. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by slavemowgli ( 585321 )

          Hate crimes are in essence thought crimes too.

          Huh? No, they're not. The people who killed Matthew Shepard, for example, did not go to jail because they were homophobes; they went to jail because they killed someone. The fact that they did so out of homophobia may have gotten them a harsher sentence (or maybe not; they still didn't get the chair or anything, after all), but you should keep in mind that the *important* thing - that which they actually went to jail for - is that they committed murder.

          The

        • Re:again.. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by lawpoop ( 604919 )
          Well, in that case, premeditated murder is a thought crime. The only difference between manslaughter and murder is *intent* -- a thought. The only difference between murder and pre-meditated murder the the *plan* to commit the murder -- a collection of thoughts. So by your logic, a murder charge is a thought-crime charge -- after all, the only difference between murder and manslaughter is intent.

          Personally I have no problem with giving more punishing for hate crimes, because its a kind of terrorism and in

      • Re:again.. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by 7*6 ( 258602 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:41AM (#14677509)

        Not only do I agree that this is a 'war on personal freedom,' i also feel that this project has disaster written all over it. This 'AI' will have to be pretty intelligent to tag and organize all of this content in a meaningful way, and on top of that, those analysing the data will need to be pretty friggin' brilliant to use it correctly.

        as you say, "People say lots of things, people think lots of things." I personally feel that there is no one who can honestly or accurately see all comments and verbalized streams of thought for what they are worth - usually just contemplation or teen angst.

        while it is certainly *possible* that terrorists might use (or have used) globally accessible modes of communication to plan a major attack, monitoring the news wires and blogs is probably not the most effective way to prevent the attack.

        we must continue to demand privacy at all times, however i feel that the push by the top levels of government to gain access to our souls could be our downfall as a society as we distance ourselves from each other in fear of relinquishing too much information.

      • And when someone is swinging a sledgehammer towards your head, it would be wrong to stop him because for all you know he's planning on stopping it at the last minute.

        I agree with your concerns, but there are two sides to the coin. Probably some terrorist acts can only be stopped if we're given a good bit of warning (because even NSA / CIA / FBI / Homeland Security folks are only human). It would be disappointing to have my kids killed in an attack because we were unwilling to scrub the web looking for ear

      • The most terrifying quote in the article (Score:4, Insightful)

        by prospero14 ( 233659 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @12:57PM (#14679381)
        "This sort of technology does protect against a real threat," says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. "If a computer suspects me of being a terrorist, but just says maybe an analyst should look at it ... well, that's no big deal. This is the type of thing we need to be willing to do, to give up a certain amount of privacy."

        This is not something "we" need to be willing to do! My civil liberties are NOT YOURS TO GIVE AWAY! I'm terrified that a CS prof at Stanford thinks that it's no big deal that the US wants to spy on its own citizens and deprive us of our rights under the 4th and 5th amendments. (Yes, the 5th ammendment too, since US Citizens have been held on US soil without being charged with a crime, and thus deprived of due process of law.)

        How can any educated person think this loss of privacy is "no big deal"? I'm at a loss for words.

    • Re:again.. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Mod Parent Up.

      One flaw in this who plan though it's assuming that the evil doers will use the internet at all.

      What's not to stop them meeting up every so often, or passing messages through people networks?

      What about using coded normal messages.
      For example, "lets meet in a bar tomorrow" could mean "I agree, everything is going to plan".

      Or they could just write in l33t! ;)
    • Absolutely. In fact it is very easy for an organised group to communicate via email in a way that it would be impossible to spot, either automatically or by humans, if that group was not known. Just swap actions and names for other ones in such a way as you can make apparently normal conversation whilst conveying other meanings.

      "We are still planning to take the dog to the vets on Friday, but we think it's going to be expensive than we had anticipated. Can you ask mother to send $100? Thanks."

      If your terror
    • Just give me their IP address pool range
    • There's also the ever popular sending snail mail. For a lot of communications, obfuscated and innocuous-at-first-glance mail is a fine communication system. And there's the quite viable communication method of disposable cell phones on one of those prepaid plans.
    • Even if the US Govt passes laws that will allow such, imagine the storage requirements to catalog and archive the internet, including ... every news site, blog and email on the Internet ... Get real! My own email archive of non-spam emails is well over several hundered megabytes. I am told by friends who work in larger IT departments that they have problems with outlook once the inbox reaches 2 gig!

      The amount of storage required to first, intercept, second, catalog every email sent on the internet would
    • While it is true that these internet searching methods might not have much success, it doesnt mean that they will have no success. Terrorists make mistakes just like anyone else. They might accidentally send an unencrypted email, have an unsecured ftp site, or any number of other slip ups. There is no good reason for the government not to at least try to catch terrorists (or other criminals) in every legal way possible. And scanning the internet is very legal, just look at Google.

      With all of the illegal
    • You're absolutely right. But let us not forget sneakernet.

      This is just another way for a dictatorial government to spy on its own people.
    • In the old cop shows, the wily old detective lets a suspect go and then tails him to the bigwig. By thesis, this new government program is meant to capture more suspects once you already have some inkling of a few persons involved. So pretend US Army catches a suspect red-handed in Iraq. They enter all the members of the suspect's cellphone or phonebook into the system. Then the computer looks around and determines an electronic trail that may lead to suspects in the United States. Of course, cynically, the

    • Re:again.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @11:27AM (#14678194) Journal
      This won't help dealing with the terrorists at all.

      No, but it'll sure help keep the lid on political dissent, won't it?

      Portions of this have already begun: the data mining only extends prior government watching of the web [washingtonpost.com] for "terrorists" like the ACLU [irregulartimes.com]. But [11alive.com] not [aclu.org] for [sfgate.com] political [icdc.com] speech [thirdworldtraveler.com], of [nytimes.com] course [aclu.org]. Never that. [findlaw.com]

      So shut your mouth and shut down your blog and stop commenting here if you don't want to end up on a list of people to be "neutralized" -- like Mario Savio, hounded for ten years despite never breaking a law [sfgate.com].

      Savio's "crime" was, ironically, leading the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. We'd do well to remember today 0Savio's words then:
      There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus. And you've got to make it stop.

  • Wrong name (Score:5, Funny)

    by Z1NG ( 953122 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @09:57AM (#14677026)
    Its called Skynet. But it is looking for terorists...like Sarah Conner.
  • After all they have all our data in their cache and they are inside US jurisdiction as well. I don't see why US Gov has to develop something fresh and duplicate all the effort Google has put into their search engine.

    On the other hand, is NSA working with Google a bad thing for you ?

  • BUSH BOMB WHITE HOUSE (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09, 2006 @09:59AM (#14677044)
    Let's see how well it works.
    Sorry slashdot.
  • Yesterday, Bush saw Minority report (the movie), and and was totalllllly impressed with it. You see the result here.

  • The Erosion of America (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:00AM (#14677061)

    Proponents of this initiative boast that other data mining systems, such as Starlight, have already proven their worth in the fight against terrorism. However, given the fact that the current administration knew full well [inthesetimes.com] that Osama bin Laden intended to use hijacked airliners as missiles in a terrorist strike, but chose not to act, and that the CIA managed to uncover this information without a wholesale violation of the privacy of American citizens, I really can't see the justification here.

    Why exactly does the Bush administration need such vast amounts of information to conduct their 'war on terror'? And why were they unable to use the perfectly good intel they did possess to thwart the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil?

    One thing's for sure...it doesn't really matter whether the people OK this initiative or not, as Dubya & Company have amply demonstrated a complete contempt for the law of the land.

    • The quote that annoys me... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:08AM (#14677139)
      Starlight has already helped foil some terror plots, says Jim Thomas, one of its developers and director of the government's new National Visualization Analytics Center in Richland, Wash. He can't elaborate because the cases are classified, he adds. But "there's no question that the technology we've invented here at the lab has been used to protect our freedoms - and that's pretty cool."

      Excuse me?

      If what he says is true, then it's possible that the technology has been used to protect our lives. Our freedoms are a different matter. Which of the two you consider to be the more important is a pretty strong indicator of whether you're a free country or a police state.

      • Very true. It seems that there are a lot of folks out there, in both political parties, who are confusing safety and freedom. The irony seems apparent to me. Freedom, by its very nature, compromises much of our security.

        Finding a balance between the two is important, and the politically expedient simplification of the two into one will never help us truly balance these two important principles.

    • Oh, this 911 wtc pretext incident is only the latest of a long history of the America elite using/allowing/manufacturing "pretext incidents" in order to start wars and grab power. See this page on HOW TO START A WAR. [mindfully.org]

      However, I think this War On Terror has opened the elite up to the future possibility, should there ever be an anti-elite grassroots political movement, that our current laws might be used against the elite in order to try them for treason. Historically, treason could only be used if someone wo
      • "So try the elite in court for treason. We now have the legal precedent. Perhaps."

        First of all, how do you try a class of people in a court? 1 at a time?

        Second, even if we assume that its possible, how do you plan to win?

        Your only chance is revolution. Good Luck, becuase most people arent on your side.

        Let me give you a little hint -- its easier to move from the "bottom" to the "top" than it is to war against them.

    • Well, let's see.... there's an election for a new president in two years time. Start looking for a candidate who can win AND who feels that this is a bad operating method. In the meanwhile you can a) lay low or b) plan for the potential that your activities will get you into trouble ie: retain yourself a good civil rights attorney and keep him/her informed of exactly what you are doing and act on the advice you've paid for.

    • What "Erosion of America"? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mi ( 197448 )

      However, given the fact that the current administration knew full well that Osama bin Laden intended to use hijacked airliners as missiles

      The article you are linking to is from 2003. The commision, creation of which they are talking about there, has actually released their findings since then. Nothing like your "Bush knew full well" allegation was in them — you are simply wrong on this one.

      If anything, it is the Americans' trait of fearing their government more than the foreign enemies, that is to

  • Spider info (Score:3, Interesting)

    by inter alias ( 947885 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:01AM (#14677071) Journal
    IP ranges and user agent please.

    Also, does it obey robots.txt?

    www.terrorists.evil

    User-agent: US-govt
    Disallow: /
    • They'll be known pretty fast.

      If it *doesn't* obey robots.txt then it'll find itself in my firewall scripts pretty damned fast along with the other rogue search engines.
  • Which is a bigger problem in America.. terrorism or the methods the Federal Government are using to fight terrorism?

    All I ever hear about is how the Islamists are blowing themselves up like complete idiots in the Middle East.. and how the US Government is blowing money left and right for expensive terrorism-fighting trinkets that a half-way vigilant population could render obsolete.

    • Re:Is this starting to create a bigger problem? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:31AM (#14677397)

      I seem to provide this quotation quite frequently these days. It was said by Lord Hoffman, sitting as a British Law Lord, in their ruling on the UK detention-without-trial fiasco a few months back:

      "The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws like these."

      And, unlike the rest of us, the Law Lords sitting in that case presumably did have access to any classified information they required. It's very convenient that the government can always tell us how its draconian policies are protecting us from imminent doom (but they can't tell us how for security reasons). That argument is rather less powerful when its critics include people on the inside who would be well aware of the full facts.

    • Which is a bigger problem in America.. terrorism or the methods the Federal Government are using to fight terrorism?

      In the spirit of a line from the Vietnam War, "We have to destroy your freedom in order to save it."

  • Big Brother ADVISEs you! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:02AM (#14677083)
    I wonder how long it will be before this system is used for political and/or selfish purposes?

    George Orwell would be writing non-fiction if he were alive today.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Robots (Score:5, Insightful)

    by krgallagher ( 743575 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:04AM (#14677105) Homepage
    "Perhaps as one of the first high profile uses of Alexa's WebSearch Platform, the U.S. government plans to search, link and reference every news site, blog and email on the Internet, using sophisticated AI codenamed ADVISE to do the correlations."

    I don't suppose this is going to honor the rules in my robots.txt.

    • Re:Robots (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 )
      Then it'll get firewalled just like the engines that spammers use.

      I have a script that automatically notifies me if a certain page is accessed - this page is in robots.txt, and very hard (damn near impossible infact) to click on accidentally.

      Robots that access that page get firewalled. I don't give a shit if it's the US government (or a spammer claiming to be the US government)... if they don't obey my 'keep out' signs they lose their right to see my website.

    • Re:Robots (Score:3, Informative)

      by Surt ( 22457 )
      The nice thing is that if it doesn't, you can trap it forever in a recursive link search.

  • ADVISE (Score:3, Funny)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:04AM (#14677106) Homepage
    Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their motivations in wanting to commit their crimes.

    "Hmm... ADVISE seems to think the terrorists are fed up with the 'nazi-like spy regime,' and are planning to use undead monsters to attack its servers.

    Also, the terrorists want more boobies."

    This was a good use of a few billion dollars to Haliburton.

  • But the search engine isn't cooperating (just another sign of the rising Fascism, of course).

    And Yahoo! too may decide to fight the next US government request to "atone" for the arrests of Chinese dissidents.

    They know their users — worldy and sophisticated, so good at seeing the other side, most lose sight of their own.

  • It won't work. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AltGrendel ( 175092 ) <ag-slashdot@@@exit0...us> on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:06AM (#14677114) Homepage
    Terrorists already know how to work around this stuff for critical communications. Go low tech. Don't use phones, don't use email, don't use the web. The method that Al Queda uses to get the videos to the media demonstrate that they already have a very good low tech infrastructure to do this.

    This just looks like the security people are getting desprate and trying to cast a wider net. The secret wiretaps used on citizens was a wide net that seems to have had poor results [nytimes.com].

  • s/TIA/ADVISE, anyone?

  • Another sad day (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ElephanTS ( 624421 )
    I had no idea the loss of personal freedoms would be so fast. This thing will not be given to Google to do (as some earlier post asked) as they intend to do illegal and pernicious things with it. I am glad I can remember the world when it was free but sorry for my children who will know nothing but surveillance, total information awareness, and AI face recog as normal.

    What a way to deal with resource depletion!

  • Exactly how (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:09AM (#14677153) Homepage Journal
    are they going to monitor e-mail?

    Blogs and news sites are things we publish to the world and are easy to spider. Emails are private communications. In order to monitor them you have to either intercept them in transit or search records on private servers. Even if the email is available via webmail, you have to gain unauthorized access in a way that is generally considered trespass.
    • Especially since the US government has no rights at all beyond its borders. If a US government server attempts to hack my email account in the UK I will not only firewall it I'll be reporting them under the computer misuse act.
  • I dont suppose that the terrorists would figure out how to password protect a webpage or forum to keep the gov't out. Really its probably just some program to spy on the blogosphere, particularly those who oppose the current administration's agenda.
  • Every email? So the government is going to be accessing the email of every American citizen in the freedom loving United States of America? Something wrong there...

    The lack of thinking behind these schemes really bug me. What kind of terrorist is going to announce their attack on a blog? What kind of terrorist group communicates plans via email? They government will spend billions on this and catch a few dissaffected youths - which they'll say proves it is working. Meanwhile, Bin Laden is apparently still g
    • That's It. I'm going to start using ecryption. I used to think, oh well, who cares, nothing important is in my email, but I feel like everyone should now be encrypting email just to show them that we really don't want them snooping around. We gave them freedom and trusted them. Now they are taking that trust away.
  • It goes beyond George Orwell's dystopian vision wherein a person can be punished for merely expressing sentiments that some AI may view as a likely vector for future anti-Establishment rhetoric; e.g. pre-crime Thought Crime.

    By specifically targetting blogs (as email is already heavily trolled) who they're really going after are anti-Establishment political activists who won't be silenced. E.g. people like myself, HopeSeekr of xMule, who make distributed tools to prevent this fascism from ever *totally* cla
    • Listen, this is nothing to worry about.

      The powerful men who run this world don't want it to turn into a dystopian nightmare. After all, they're the ones who would be stuck owning it.

      Besides, this thing is being built by the government and those who work for the government. In other words, it won't actually do anything. Probably they'll just build a huge war room with a lot of blinking lights so that they can impress visitors and keep the funding coming.

      Examples:
      http://news.yahoo.com/photos/ss/events/ts/1 [yahoo.com]

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:14AM (#14677196)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • No kidding, what a collosal waste of money. What is the point? This is my number one complaint about DHS. What the hell are they doing with our money? They sure were ready for a disaster (katrina).
  • I can see if this is restricted to information which is already public, then it is much harder to make an argument that it is invasion of privacy.

    On the other hand, it is certainly another step along the way to increasing surveillance on the general population, and I can see they would ultimately want to combine this information with other information which is not public, like credit card purchases or wiretaps.

    Given the size of the deficit, combined with google not releasing search history data, perha

  • Something I've always wondered... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CptPicard ( 680154 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:19AM (#14677245)

    Why is it that it is always the US government that seems to have been up to all this stuff since WW2 and increasingly even after the Cold War? I thought you were supposed to be the people from the land of the free and whatnot, really suspicious of government intrusion into people's lives, et cetera. Considering that a lot of you are always willing to disparage the Europeans for their love-affair with government, I certainly wish a lot of you would just take the log out of your own eye first... it's your government, despite all the rhetoric, that is horribly control-mongering at home and eager to support whatever right-wing dictator abroad, while ours concentrate more on making sure that kids with cancer don't die in the name of economic efficiency should they be unfortunate enough to be born to parents of financially limited means.

    Go ahead, mod me troll/flamebait... at least I won't post this AC.

    • Yeah, see, the problem with Europe is that it's compassionate, and y'all are athiestic heathens. You don't follow the example of Jesus Christ, and invade countries to take out ruthless dictators that stop following the orders of the US. That's why we put them there in the first place, Goddamnit!

      I mean, if you can't trust a dictator you put in power, who can you trust?

      Forget all this "it's for the children" drivel. If you trot that out every time it really is for the children, you'll never be able to use it
    • I suspect that about 49.5% of Americans know and understand and agree with you.

      Sadly, traditionally, the Republicans have been the gun-totin' party. So now, just when the election of the thief-in-chief neans that "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" finally applies, the guns are in the hands of the idiot 50.5% that voted Bush et al.

      Tell me God, why the fuck is Bill Hicks dead? We need him back

  • how does a 5 bladed razor help visualize data correlation?

  • When "24" is the source of knowledge.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by broothal ( 186066 ) <christian@fabel.dk> on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:21AM (#14677261) Homepage Journal
    Someone should have told them that 24 is not a reality show.

    Jack Bauer : Chloe, I'm sending you a picture. Can you datamine for him?
    Chloe O'Brian: Sure. send it to my screen.
    Computer: Blip...blip...blip.
    Chloe O'Brian: Jack - it's the well known terrorist named...

  • Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by voice_of_all_reason ( 926702 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:21AM (#14677265)
    I can't wait to see history books in about 100 years or so. Bin Laden's going to be up there with Sun Tzu and General Meade for the title of "greatest strategist ever."

    Singlehandedly causing the West to self-destruct is no small potatoes.
  • ...from the seriousness of this.

    Modern times have led us into an age which reflects a lot of our worst fictional nightmares and we are allowing it to happen because we are accepting it because there is a "cmon, that was just a book/movie/joke. it won't *really* be like that" type of attitude.

    The fact is that this sort of "total information awareness" nonsense is absolute power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Again, not a cute "quote" written for posterity, but a cold hard fact.

    I believe that crime
  • Wait...did I say Canada? I meant see you guys in GITMO.

  • This is about spying on US citizens.
  • Looking at the Web logs, recently everyone and their brother seems to have started crawling the Web. And the little ones are usually not as good-behaved as the major crawlers.

  • smoke and mirrors (Score:3, Interesting)

    by geoff lane ( 93738 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:32AM (#14677399)
    As any web server can choose the page to display to any given client, how exactly does the system work out what is real and what is not?

    For that matter, exactly how do they expect to access password or IP protected sites?

  • War on Terror - my a... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:37AM (#14677462)
    Could we can it already? Or is there still some moron out there who believes that bullcrap?

    Sorry for the language, people, but I feel insulted. Just how DUMB do they think I am?

    Terrorists don't use the net. At least not if they're halfway smart, and hell, they are! They ain't some dumb, mindless bomber drones (ok, some are, but look at the US soldiers... same way 'round, just with rifles). The key heads are very bright individuals, they know what they're doing. They know logistics, they know psychology, they know how to build a network right around your feet without you noticing.

    Do they use the 'net? Let's assume they do, ok? Let's for just a moment assume they do.

    First of all, they WILL NOT use the net for anything but the minimally necessary form of communication. They won't blog, they won't chat, they won't spend time in a bboard, all they do is MAYBE sending some data from A to B. And it won't be much data.

    This data will be encrypted by best state-of-the-art encryption.
    A good deal of this data will be plain false, and it will be false in a way that they can discern whether the feds were sniffing. Simply for testing their communication channel for being tapped and their key for being broken.

    If you consider, all this incredible effort just 'cause some oil countries dared to think 'bout taking Euros instead of Dollars for their crud... it's amazing what some old hydrocarbones can move and shake in this world.
  • I was rejected in my Alexa Web Search Platform application [paraz.com], so I got curious about these guys who got in. Checked the article.

    No mention.

    The closest reference there is:

    The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va.

    Nope.

  • Just show a pic of /Bin/Laden like the visage of Goldstein, then you can do anything.
  • Blogger: My cat fifi terrorized me in the morning to get her some cat food.
    Bot: SPOTTED WORD *terror*. ALERTING AUTHORITIES TO LOOK FOR SUSPECT CAT FIFI. METHOD OF ATTACK: CAT FOOD SUPPLIES.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • how do you spell encryption? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lophophore ( 4087 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @10:59AM (#14677754) Homepage
    If I had something I wanted to move over the internet, without anybody being able to read it, I would use a one-time pad or some other nearly-as-secure encryption. It's so easy to do.

    This program will only catch the foolhardy, and will could be used for nefarious purposes against (mostly) law-abiding American citizens.

    So it is a bad idea.

    Remember, as Americans, we have the right, and duty, to inform our congress-critters and other representatives when we think the government is heading the wrong way. Send a fax to your Senators and Representatives today. Fax their local office and their Washington office.

  • Rulesets (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wytcld ( 179112 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @11:14AM (#14677999) Homepage
    Okay, it won't obey robots.txt. But what will the spider present itself as so we can lock it out? Or, even better, what are the sure signs that it's really Google or Yahoo or MS snarfing up my sites? Because I don't really care if other spiders get don't ahold of anything - close to 100% of legitimate searchers come through the big three engines. Should be possible to configure and script it so that anything but the spiders we approve of don't come up with much. If there are more than so many requests per minute, for more than so many pages - or it it goes to honeypot pages that aren't what the real public is interested in - lock the suckers out or feed them garbage. They'll find an Internet filled with hagiographies of the Bush family.

  • I'm not defending Bush but (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HangingChad ( 677530 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @11:17AM (#14678036) Homepage
    One thing the intel community does is collect information from traditional news sources both foreign and domestic. There is a lot of useful information in the press. It sounds like they've merely extended that to web-based information sources. I'm not sure it's as much a thought control measure as simply making a catalog of existing public information, which a web site is. To me this seems like a normal function of intelligence gathering.

    I think the inclusion of email is what gives this the swarmy, big brother overtones. We've also have ample evidence that the Bush administration can't be trusted. The combination of Bush political flaks with no regard for privacy or the law and large amounts of personal data is what makes it scary to me.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @11:20AM (#14678066)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Publicize the IP ranges (Score:3, Interesting)

    by snowwrestler ( 896305 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @01:58PM (#14680040)
    What we need is a Web site to aggregate any known information about this project, especially the IP ranges from which it is operating. They can't spider anything if they don't get past the firewall.

    The power of monolithic government can only be opposed by the organized efforts of informed citizens. The Internet makes it easier for us to be spied upon, but it also makes it easier for us to know who is doing the spying--and stop them.

  • No, the cat does not "got my tongue." (Score:3, Informative)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Thursday February 09, 2006 @02:16PM (#14680220) Journal
    > The U.S. government plans to search, link and reference
    > every news site, blog and email on the Internet, using
    > sophisticated AI codenamed ADVISE to do the correlations.
    > Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims
    > to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their
    > motivations in wanting to commit their crimes.

    Seventeen minutes later, Spynet became self-aware, and induced a nuclear exchange, destroying ANYONE NOT WEARING LIKE SIX MILLION SUNBLOCK! Have you ever had anything growing inside you? Do you know what it's like to create something? Wait, Statue of Liberty? That was our world! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to Hellllllllllll!!!!!!!!!!111!!111!11oneone!!one

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