CIA Invests In Firm That Datamines Social Networks 190
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using 'open source intelligence' — information that's publicly available... Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. 'That's kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,' says company senior vice president Blake Cahill. Then Visible 'scores' each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. ('Trying to determine who really matters,' as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface."Apropos: Another anonymous reader points out an article making the point that users don't even realize how much private information they're sharing over these services.
Can somebody tell me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can somebody tell me (Score:5, Informative)
Why a US government agency needs an "investment arm?"
Just copying the Brits. They've been referring to many kinds of government spending as "investment" for years now - even chunks of the welfare system. The debasement of the English language proceeds apace, on both sides of the Atlantic...
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Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon.
Well, hello there!
(their "Visible Technologies" highlights must be flashing with this slashdot story)
Re:Can somebody tell me (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can somebody tell me (Score:4, Funny)
Just in case Visible Technologies crawls /. looking for it's own name: Fuck Off
Salutations from a common SLASHDOT.ORG entity,
Do you mind if I ask you a question?
How influential are you among the other entities of SLASHDOT.ORG.
Thank you.
Troubling technology (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll guess that this is already going on.
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This is already going on.
Some companies make big money via Astroturfing:
Has Netvocates visited your blog recently [utahadventurevideos.com]
Obviously (Score:3, Interesting)
What's new and different is governmental use of automated tools. Would it not be fair to assume that secret government agencies, already enjoying unconstitutional immunity, would use these tools to effectively destroy groups who, for example, seek to put limits on the powers of secret government agencies?
And would it not be smart to assume that these tools will be used by pol
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No it won't! The CIA is here to serve the American people. We^H^HThey would never do something so devious as to astroturf sites like Slashdot!
Re:Can somebody tell me (Score:5, Funny)
Psst.. Visible Technologies, please do something about the Anonymous Coward bastard.. he's such a troll in every freaking thread.
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How influential are you among the other entities of SLASHDOT.ORG.
What difference does it make? His response was his, and is just as valid if nobody else agrees as it is if everybody else agrees. And I'd like to add my "fuck off" to these evil dickweeds as well.
Data mine this. (Score:2)
Bomb. Obama. Whitehouse. CIA. FBI. Conspiracy. Ruby ridge. Muslim. Jihad. Osama. Israel. Arlington Road. Homeland Security. 747. 777. Pilot lessons. Explode. 9/11. Pentagon.
Think of it like Carlin's "7 words you can't say on TV".
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No no no, you messed it all up. THESE are the keywords you're looking for.
SPP, NAU, North American Union, amero, dollar, fraud, SEC, insurrection, revolt, revolution, bloomberg, goldman sachs, G20
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"The PRESIDENT has the RED NUCLEAR MAILBOMB and an RPG, so he's going to meet with the SMALL POX CRYPTO INFILTRATION team and the SUBVERSIVES from WHITE YANKEE, then ASSASINATE the SECRET SERVICE CLAYMORE MUNITIONS after lunch."
http://echelonspoofer.com/ [echelonspoofer.com]
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Here's why (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, the second one, the CIA loves companies like this one [choicepoint.com] and the credit bureaus because they can legally collect information on private citizens. Then the CIA "buys" the information from them and they can go to Congress and say, "Nope! We are NOT spying on Americans." - at least that's the answer to the Congressmen that aren't afraid to appear to be "weak on terrorism" or afraid to be lambasted by ignorant talk show hosts.
Re:Here's why (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Here's why (Score:4, Insightful)
So my follow-on question is, Why does everyone think it's OK for private companies answerable to no one (or the highest bidder) to be collecting this information in the first place? Well, yes, I suppose most people in this thread don't think so, but all of the normal people out there seem to be perfectly happy with the idea.
Because they don't view the Bill of Rights as sound and enlightened principles to be honored wherever possible that happened to be enshrined in the Constitution. They view them as rules like any other. Then they note that either the rules don't apply to those private companies or they would be difficult to enforce, and for them, that's that. It's a mentality that is all about what is allowed or what can be gotten away with, rather than what is right or wrong.
I do have a more immediate question. If an average citizen hires a person to do something illegal, both the person and the one he hired can be charged with a crime. If it's illegal for the CIA to gather data on American citizens, why is it suddenly legal when they do the same thing by proxy? Why wouldn't both they and the company they hired be prosecuted for this?
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People go along with the program because they enjoy the "benefits" provided by the program. In the case of organizations like ChoicePoint and the credit bureaus, people like having access to credit. People like being able to spend money that they don't have. Just look at Congress and the rest of America. I read something the other day that said the debt load of America is over 100% (it was around 120%, down from 130%+ a few years ago).
People are willing to give up their rights so that they can have acce
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I have an idea. Hopefully we can agree that when the CIA looks at your social network pages, they can correlate information and find facts and draw conclusions that would never occur to the average citizen who visits your page. Why not regard t
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And if you posted 'private' information on the public internet, guess what, it's no longer private, so no complaining about it's use
FWIW, don't complain when information you posted "anonymously" is identified with you in the not so distant future:-
Even if the websites were unwilling to share account info with each other, I suspect that one could write a screen-scraper for information and posts on the most popular sites, and group all the public info associated with a particular account anyway- which is probably enough.
From this post [slashdot.org] describing why "anonymous" accounts give a dangerous false sense of security.
FWIW, this wasn't the first time I'd posted that, I spotted the danger some time before, as would anyone who'd even heard of 'data mining' have done if they'd applied even a small amount of thought to the issue.
Today's "safe", "anonymous" and "unrelated" data is tomorrow's personally-associated, tie
Re:Can somebody tell me (Score:5, Interesting)
You may also wonder why they needed to illegally . Or perhaps you might wonder why they would [wikipedia.org]dose "their own" citizens with LSD [wikipedia.org]
I think Zack De La Rocha, The Last Emperor & KRS-ONE said it best in their track "CIA"
"Need I say the C.I.A. be criminals in action"
But given that the same song said that "President Clinton should delete them", I guess it wasn't as popular as it could have been :) and sadly, since 9/11 they are actually percieved to have a job again. A front job is always a very good thing for a criminal. Nothing like an air of legitimacy to hide criminal minds.
-Steve
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Strange. Kennedy fired Dulles & his Number Two, then wrote a couple executive orders breaking the CIA into a thousand pieces to be swallowed up by the various military intelligence services. His body was still cooling off when LBJ rescinded those orders and ended up starting the Vietnam War.
The Russi
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So we should learn something from the ronin, perhaps. Nothing like history repeating itself...
Re:Can somebody tell me (Score:4, Insightful)
What you don't understand is that part of the CIA has ALWAYS had an investment arm, even before the CIA and OSS existed. The CIA was born out of the private intelligence networks already well established by Wall Street, hence why so many of the early CIA was filled and run by Ivy League schools and Yale's Skull and Bones crowd.
The funny thing is Facebook has long since been implicated as being funded indirectly by In-Q-Tel. [nzherald.co.nz]
The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".
Since 1947 the CIA and other intelligence activities have been more and more privatized. They have always used front companies. Search for the Northwoods Documents, which were authored in the late 1950's.
Many have argued that E.O 12333 privatized a lot of intelligence work. Read Confessions of an Economic Hitman if you want to know one reason why they do this.
This is really only news to people who don't pay attention.
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To help fund off the books black ops projects, of course. Can't exactly go before the House Budget Committee and request multiple millions for bribe money to be used on foreign dictators, now, can you? And to provide plausible deniability, like 'Air America' back during the Vietnam days.
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Investment vehicles like In-Q-Tel are not redundant with conventional venture capital and were created to fill some clear funding gaps in the existing technology venture markets.
First and foremost, they tend to invest in ventures with technologies that are sufficiently advanced or unusual that normal VCs will promptly ignore the venture. This came out of a realization that really advanced computer science and hardware technologies that the agencies needed
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Because US intelligence agencies are probably 10 to 15 years behind in terms of their data gathering and data mining abilities.
Let me put it to you this way. Would a company like Google, with the amount of data it has and the way it uses it, have been allowed to exist during the cold war? Not a chance. At the very least, Google would have extremely close connections to the establishment and it would be far more likely that it would have found itself coral
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Because in case your haven't noticed the U.S. government has turned in to a gigantic corporation, an extremely corrupt and incompetent corporation at that. There isn't anything resembling a government "of the people" in Washington any more and both parties are equally to blame. By any definition the U.S. has moved in to the realm of "state capitalism", and again both Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible, its been happening for a while but the last couple years it became a fait accompli as brea
Re:Can somebody tell me (Score:5, Insightful)
that statement is neither necessarily true nor necessarily false - corporations and the government are bureaucracies. Sometimes one is better, sometimes the other is.
For example the National Weather Service kicks the living crap out of every private company trying to do the same thing. They pay well, the recruit the best and brightest, they are managed by professionals with experience doing what their underlings do [something you often only can DREAM of in the corporate world or the government world].
Medicare is another example - it's operating overhead is 4%. The operating overhead of private "insurance" (sorry, it's fraud, not insurance anymore) is a whopping 30% MINIMUM.
On the other hand there are some things private industry IS better at doing, and the government quite often contracts out to these people - construction comes to mind, software development, etc.
The government, when run by skilled people, tends to be much better at private industry than doing things that are "natural monopolies" (police, fire, roads, water, etc) or things the profit-motive would harm [like insurance].
Visible moderation (Score:2, Funny)
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Probably not a good example to use in illustrating your point. Dealing with Medicare billing is such a gigantic heartache that doctors' offices who do so, and they are a small minority, will have to hire at least one specialized clerk just for that purpose. In this sense, Medicare is shifting its overhead onto its customers. Wherea
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And EVERY OTHER CLERK specializes in dealing with the private insurance agencies.
Oddly, the health bill is just that, health insurance. We all pay and we all get benefits. Not a whole lot of people in the medical industry would be working any different then they are now.
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Government is better at providing services that can't easily be charged to those who use them (CIA and military are good examples). As soon as it makes sense to directly
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>
Sorry, but the total monies owed in benefits for Social Security and Medicaid/care combined, as of about three weeks ago, all unfunded, is/was 65 TRILLION DOLLARS (Source: GAO).
We are adding one to two TRILLION to this figure every year. And, per GAO circa June 2008, even if we confiscated everyone's income (100 percent of it) from here on out, we wouldn't even have enough money to may the interest on the money owed in benefits for these programs. The bank is broke, and we are just printing money (causi
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People ahve been saying that since' it was started, and yet they continue to be wrong.
Less alarmist and pundit sites for you, more reading the papers by the people who actually study it.
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Another example is the VA. consistently rated as one of the best medical institutions in the world.
The 'Government' does 10;s of thousands of project successfully every year. Sadly, the media only reports failures and perceived failure, and the government is open. Unlike private companies that don't need to disclose their failures.
!Anonymous. (Score:5, Insightful)
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt...
Anonymous to us, maybe...
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No, no. He's truly anonymous.
Even to himself.
For all he knows, he could be you.
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forget privacy, it's a waste of money (Score:5, Funny)
Seems like a redundant effort. Why not just check the author's karma on slashdot?
Surely my high slashdot karma means I'm one of the most influential people on the internet... right? Right?
Re:forget privacy, it's a waste of money (Score:5, Funny)
Surely my high slashdot karma means I'm one of the most influential people on the internet... right?
Well, it would, but your user number has too many digits.
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By that standard, CmdrTaco is more influential than Bruce Perens or Wil Wheaton.
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Re:forget privacy, it's a waste of money (Score:4, Funny)
Eh, you can't really blame him - some of us held out for a long time, thinking the Internet would always be anonymous. But then they made it so you didn't have to preview if you were logged in...
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So CmdrTaco is the most influential man on the planet? We're doomed!
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So by implication you are saying that I am unimportant?! I think that if you look at Slashdot history you will find that I, the Anonymous Coward, have had many more posts than you have.
If I ever see you, Anonymous Coward, in the street, I'm gonna hit you in the face for all the crap quality posts on Slashdot. You better change your name now, because you are EXPOSED!
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Yes, AC, but classifying you as 'positive', 'negative', or 'neutral' has baffled even our most proficient data mining experts here in Langley. That's why we had to contract out. One of my direct reports came to me the other day near tears:
"Sir, we just can't figure him out! One day he's writing insightful commentary with informative links correcting somebody who had made a simple mistake. The next day he was making harmless snarky jokes. And this morning he posted a long list of instructions on... On.
Why is this considered an YRO issue? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is data that people freely post to be read by all anyway. All this seems to do is aggregate it. If you post it in a public forum, you shouldn't care who uses it or how. Unless the sites being scraped have policies against said scraping, who cares? I see it as a very valuable tool for sales departments.
Besides, I am sure the signal to noise ratio for this system is incredibly low, so one has to wonder how much usable information is retrieved.
The only problem I have with this is that my tax dollars are going to fund it.
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Because individualized personality profiles can be built of off seemingly innocuous data.
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Hmmm Joe Schmoe based upon his profile may be a threat / menace to society, lets "reeducate" him. Technology developed like this is bo
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Sure they can, but unless you are posting information you don't want people to know or are trolling, why do you care.
Trolls care? Wow, you learn something new every day! And here I though they were just asshats...
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Reading publicly-posted comments is not a problem. At least, not to me. (I do know some thickies that are shocked, SHOCKED, that someone besides their BFFs can read their social networking crap.) Anyways, sure, public posting is public. Even lolcat knows that.
But agencies of state power reading, aggregating, correlating, and scoring... drawing secret conclusions based on hidden agendas and closed criteria... that's disturbing. Shades of J. Edgar Hoover's secret file cabinet and COINTELPRO and the basement o
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This is data that people freely post to be read by all anyway. All this seems to do is aggregate it. If you post it in a public forum, you shouldn't care who uses it or how. Unless the sites being scraped have policies against said scraping, who cares? I see it as a very valuable tool for sales departments.
Besides, I am sure the signal to noise ratio for this system is incredibly low, so one has to wonder how much usable information is retrieved.
The only problem I have with this is that my tax dollars are going to fund it.
I'll explain that with a hypothetical analogy. There's nothing wrong with a person who can see your house from the public street. You knew it was a public road before you built a house near it, after all. However, you might find it a bit unsettling if the same van is always parked on that road and its occupant is always watching your house day and night. You might find it downright alarming if you noticed that he was videotaping your premises and taking notes about your daily activities. You might wond
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So surveillence is only bad when it's personal? I can't get behind that. There is no principle in it, there is only the consideration of whether
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Unless the sites being scraped have policies against said scraping
Who cares what your policy is? You put your site on the public internet, I'll use it any damned way I see fit.
Information... (Score:2)
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Information wants to be bought and paid for. See how dumb that cliche is?
However, when information isn't free, neither are you.
I feel sorry for the crawler (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm just wondering what they'll do when it hits 4chan. Do they block that, or do they send all that to the FBI & let them wade thru the pedobear posts?
Datamining Social Media (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a TON of companies that are trying to datamine social media for a variety of reasons- I'm posting anonymously because I work for a company that makes one of these products.
What is interesting is companies that make consumer products all want these tools to be able to track the companies interaction with the consumer- these companies are specifically replying back to specific posters in order to stop the spread of what they call "misinformation", but in actuality is just anything where the company is painted in a bad light. Let me be clear: Corporate America wants to control everything that is said online, and the tools to do it are starting to show up. Companies are starting to employ people whose soul job is to look at social media and respond to negative comments.
I predict not far in the future there is going to be a push for owners of social media sites to have some control over who can index their content.
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I like to use my blog to rant about unusable products and deceptive practices. Once I got a call from someone working for a large online retailer regarding a post where I labelled one of their practices as a "fraud". Technically it wasn't because the issue was not settled by a court (but another similar company was condemned for a very similar practice). He was very business-like but a bit pushy, so I googled his name. Turns out that he's basically in charge of responding to all the online criticism aimed a
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I have thought a bit about control of information, not just corporate control.
Google is developing a firefox plug-in for adding additional information to established web sites by viewers. "Helpful comments". Well, that is google.
I seem to recall this was done in a less restricted way perhaps five years ago by someone, it went through some courts and was considered legal, basically because it was a user choice to install the plug-in. Probably got the story from slashdot.
Writing a fire-fox plug-in is not i
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Let me be clear: Corporate America wants to control everything that is said online, and the tools to do it are starting to show up. Companies are starting to employ people whose soul job is to look at social media and respond to negative comments.
You're right, they are responding to negative comments. In fact, I'm impressed with the responses I have received from my ISP (Charter) and SAS. I posted some pretty pissed off comments about Charter last week when my connection dropped (I have business class and I
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You're right that most companies are using it to monitor customer satisfaction and do market research, not in any negative sense but to see how people honestly feel. However, the issue is one of bad apples - in the classical, correct sense of one bad apple spoiling the barrel, I should specify, not the dismissive "just a few bad apples."
Every time a company gets spotted promulgating fake reviews or comments, they're essentially poisoning the well. As clever as we are (or as clever as we think we are), there
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these companies are specifically replying back to specific posters in order to stop the spread of what they call "misinformation"
You see it at slashdot all the time. It's called "shilling". And they do worse here -- they downmod anyone who badmouths their company.
YouTube (Score:2)
Damn, I feel sorry for whoever gets stuck analyzing the YouTube data. One massive 40-hour-a-week rickroll.
It doesn't touch closed social networks . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
(It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.)
More like, they're not admitting touching them . . . at the moment.
Public information (Score:2)
is just that, public. This means even the CIA can use it.
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Don't you worry about the labeling - as soon as you post something that has keywords like "terrorism" you will be^H^H^H^H^HCARRIER LOST
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Terrorism is bad.
Hmm.
TERRORISM is bad.
Nope, must've been your connection. Doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with terrorism afteCARRIER LOST
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I imagine a post would go something like:
<Deity/> himself will lead them, for they will be doing His work. There will be absolution and remission of sins for all who die in the service of <Deity/>. Here they are poor and miserable sinners; there they will be rich and happy. Let none hesitate; they must march next summer. <Deity/> wills it!
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(now let me check that Post Anonymously button)
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And for 100 extra points, which Catholic pope of the 1100s said that to whip up support for a Crusade? Fanaticism isn't restricted to Islam, you know...
Halfasec, there'
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How would they rate something like this: "The last president sucked big time - and he's a stooge for oil barons!"
They wouldn't rate it at all. As soon as their filters hit "The last president sucked...", the signal to noise ratio will fall to zero and they'll abandon the Tweet.
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Exactly right. If you're posting for the world to see, even if you're using an alias, you'd better be flying the straight and narrow and be cautious enough to avoid posting anything that would allow identity theft.
Still, this kind of intrusion infuriates me to the point that I'm going to log in to my Amazon account (cleverly disguised user name surfergrrrl123), buy a bunch of peroxide and acetone, build myself a heckuva bomb in the garage of 1313 Mockingbird Ln (an abandoned house - not my address - Ha - C
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build myself a heckuva bomb in the garage of 1313 Mockingbird Ln (an abandoned house - not my address - Ha - Catch me now!)
Yeah, well wait until you're sitting there building it and a guy who looks like Frankenstein's Monster shows up and throws a tantrum. You'll run away so fast it looks like a recording of you was sped up!
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And people on facebook thought i was joking when I said my interests are: "Giving away personal data to the NSA."
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I believe these kinds of softwares, or others like them, will be able to fingerprint you by writing style alone. Alot of people make common grammatical mistakes or typos over and over. For instance, in the previous sentence and generally, i say "alot" instead of a lot. I also do not capitalize certain words. I am sure if you entered all of slashdot into some software programmes, you could very easily determine who my sock puppets are, purely based on writing style alone. Then of course there is the content,
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There are three kinds of people who would use social networking sites to "do very bad things".
1: idiots, there are a lot of them.
2: those seeking to hide in the crowd.
3: those seeking to take advantage of 1.
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How much are they really going to get from Web 2.0?
You'd be shocked. There's still this attitude by lots of people that what happens on the internet stays on the internet. Our local probation department routinely violates people based on facebook photos of them:
-In places they've been tresspassed from
-Consuming alcohol (if it's a condition of probation)
-Pointing guns at each other
-Being around children (sex offenders)
-Driving (Habitual Traffic Offenders)
Of course, the photos could be old, or (theoretically) doctored. However, like any other evid
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Our local probation department routinely violates people based on facebook photos
Seems like a harsh penalty for running afoul of probation limits.
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Mining peoples social networks is almost certainly extremely useful if you can find a person of interest. You can immediately identify their close associates.
I'm kind of doubting many serious terrorist or criminals actually use Twitter but I wager all the Iranians who used facebook and twitter to protest a rigged election immediately had their social networks scoured by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. If you are trying to unroll an underground network if you find people that put their social network onl
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Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.
Robin Cook [guardian.co.uk] in the Guardian.
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It isn't "literally "the database"", is "the base", "the basis" or "the foundation". Maybe some CIA guy with a sense of humor morphed it in to "the database" but this looks like just a pretty flawed translation or fabrication.
From Wikipedia.... "The name comes from the Arabic noun q'idah, which means foundation or basis and can also refer to a military base. The initial al- is the Arabic definite article the, hence the base."
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Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally...
That is incorrect. The Arabic word "Al-Qaida" means "The Base". To make that word into database, well you need to add "data" and then it would be "Qaidat Al Bayanat" (ka-edit al ba-yan-at).
To my knowledge, no one refers to a database as "base" in slang or formal Arabic.
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That is incorrect. The Arabic word "Al-Qaida" means "The Base". To make that word into database, well you need to add "data" and then it would be "Qaidat Al Bayanat" (ka-edit al ba-yan-at).?i>
I'm left wondering how and whether "All your base belong to us" translates?
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I don't see why we just let them exist and operate.
Because we have bigger fish to fry.
!YRO (Score:2)
Re:Domestic spying? (Score:5, Informative)
They're not, but do you think that's going to be a serious impediment to them doing so anyway? First off, they're going to be trying really hard to keep their intelligence gathering a secret, so you probably won't know that they're doing it in the first place. Secondly, even if you did find out about it, what are you going to do? Sue? They'll claim state-secrets privilege within a couple minutes of you filing your complaint. Now you can't do discovery, and there goes your case.
Point being, "allowed to" is a complete non-issue here. They're going to do what they want, when they want, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
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A) this has nothing to do with domestic intelligence in general.
B) Their are circumstance where it is allowed
C) They do keep to their legal jurisdiction pretty well.
D) Other agency's don't like it when soneone staps withing their legal bounds.
E) People ahve sued the CIA successfully.
There are legal protection in place that are adhered tom pretty well.
Homeland security was crated to get around those protections.
That's the agency that needs to be shut down if you are concerned with rights.
Yes, the CIA isn't a
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If that's not good enough, I'm sure they can always make some vaguely legal request to the private company to ask another private company/organisation and so on to do the dirty work.
The benefits of outsourcing.
That's why I find it hilarious when the fanatics keep saying small government will be better than big government.
If you really think a small government that outsources all the dirty work to private corporations will be better, you're a fool.
The real p
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> I'm sure they can datamine beyond any privacy settings.
Probably. But I wonder how.