Guilt By Semantics
The organization responsible for overseeing web standards, the W3C, is supporting an "advance" in internet technology called the "semantic web". The semantic web is developed from a data structure called Resource Description Framework (RDF). RFD basically assigns every type of data with a unique marker or tag, which then can be tracked.
David de Roure at the University of Southampton states:
As the magazine "New Scientist" reported:
Great, the government's playing the EVIL version of the Kevin Bacon game. So now, if you even play community softball with the 3rd cousin of a radical vegetarian PETA member, or go to the movies with the uncle of a pesky peaceful Quaker, you're on the Pentagon's "terrorist" watch list.
Meanwhile, Osama's walking right into the Capital Building for a meeting of the Carlyle Group, kidney dialysis machine in tow.
Perfect.
This is literally the development of a system by which people are guilty by association, something completely antithetical to American standards of Democracy. Political preferences, sexual orientation, preferred media sources, club memberships, mutual sporting or entertainment activities, banking usage, consumer purchases, and medical history all could be lumped into a nice fat file on over 230 million Americans. All while simultaneously reducing our capacity to narrow our focus on REAL terrorists.
Funny, but I thought we were hunting a small number of crazed, violent, wingnut religious fanatics, not average Americans. Silly me.
Well, snooping on so-called guilt-by-association trails goes both ways. Behold the trail of reports:
And when you combine this with clearly partisan, not to mention incompetant data collection agencies like Choicepoint, Sweet Jesus, freedom itself is in danger.
In all their efforts to "connect-the-dots", all the (now conservobot-controlled) intelligence community has been able to do, is create more dots. Now they seek to find more efficient methods to locate the needle in the haystack they themselves created, and they are willing to put your personal freedoms and privacy on the chopping block to do it.
In a wealth of damn fool ideas these days, this one is among the top ten classic demonstrations of sheer idiocy.
David de Roure at the University of Southampton states:
"RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people."
As the magazine "New Scientist" reported:
"The idea is to see by how many links or “degrees” separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation."
Great, the government's playing the EVIL version of the Kevin Bacon game. So now, if you even play community softball with the 3rd cousin of a radical vegetarian PETA member, or go to the movies with the uncle of a pesky peaceful Quaker, you're on the Pentagon's "terrorist" watch list.
Meanwhile, Osama's walking right into the Capital Building for a meeting of the Carlyle Group, kidney dialysis machine in tow.
Perfect.
This is literally the development of a system by which people are guilty by association, something completely antithetical to American standards of Democracy. Political preferences, sexual orientation, preferred media sources, club memberships, mutual sporting or entertainment activities, banking usage, consumer purchases, and medical history all could be lumped into a nice fat file on over 230 million Americans. All while simultaneously reducing our capacity to narrow our focus on REAL terrorists.
Funny, but I thought we were hunting a small number of crazed, violent, wingnut religious fanatics, not average Americans. Silly me.
Well, snooping on so-called guilt-by-association trails goes both ways. Behold the trail of reports:
- At W3C's annual conference in Edinburgh, Scotland this May, a research paper entitled "Semantic Analytics on Social Networks" was released. In a footnote to that paper, it was revealed that part of the funding for the research came from an organization called Advanced Research Development Activity (ARDA).
- Another report produced in January of this year by the Congressional Research Service entitled "Data Mining and Homeland Security" revealed that ARDA is in fact a research arm of the NSA, whose job it is, to "make sense" of the voluminous amounts of data NSA is scooping up now, including domestic data, which NSA was never intended to be given access to when it was originally chartered. ARDA's job is to see if the notion of a "semantic web" could be used to connect people.
- The NSA recently changed the name of ARDA to DTO. The ominously named "Disruptive Technology Office". Charged with "online social network analysis", it has the familiar whiff of the similarly odious criminal Poindexter-led "Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, which was by Congressional order, SUPPOSED to have been abolished. Instead, they simply broke the program into smaller pieces and reincorporated the Fascist nightmare into the classified section of the September 2003 Defense Appropriations Act.
And when you combine this with clearly partisan, not to mention incompetant data collection agencies like Choicepoint, Sweet Jesus, freedom itself is in danger.
In all their efforts to "connect-the-dots", all the (now conservobot-controlled) intelligence community has been able to do, is create more dots. Now they seek to find more efficient methods to locate the needle in the haystack they themselves created, and they are willing to put your personal freedoms and privacy on the chopping block to do it.
In a wealth of damn fool ideas these days, this one is among the top ten classic demonstrations of sheer idiocy.
posted by CTF Editor at
8:03 AM
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