rigorousintuition.ca

CIA's 'Facebook' Program Dramatically Cuts Agency's Costs
Wired News - Roy Wood - Sep 29, 2011
... this bit is equally hilarious and disturbing, particularly in light of things like the Echelon program and the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. ...
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/09/ci ... cys-costs/

...

If you missed this one when it first came out, now is a good time to take a look at The Onion’s satirical take on the true nature of Facebook:

CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs

As with all great satire, this bit is equally hilarious and disturbing, particularly in light of things like the Echelon program and the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. But it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you, right?

Tags: CIA, Facebook, humor, satire, The Onion News Network

...AND...

When Machines Get Ahead Of Us
Forbes (blog) - Roger Kay - Sep 20, 2011
However, Projects Etymon and Echelon illustrate what could be done two decades ago in terms of mass surveillance. Obviously, hardware is more powerful, ...
...

Many years ago, I was involved with the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) Project Etymon, a computational linguistics effort designed to help find the needle in the intelligence haystack. None of the people in our little software firm had a security clearance, and it’s quite possible that some of our programmers might not have been able to get one. So, Fort Meade threw its requirements over the wall, and we threw our software back.

But the working mechanism of the project could readily be deduced from things we did know. For example, when our contact asked for script support for Oriya, Telugu, Burmese, and Amharic, we knew that only one was of real interest. And which one could be inferred pretty quickly by reading the front page of the New York Times, which in the early 1990s was carrying on about President Bill Clinton’s debacle in Somalia, where they happen to share a script set (written language) with the Ethiopians called Amharic (the only native African script, as it happens).

Now, our software did something fairly pedestrian long since taken over by Unicode, which created the standard index for all the world’s written languages and then some (e.g., smiley faces and other random digital art). It mapped script elements (characters) to code points (index numbers). In itself, this capability was pretty boring, and we had aspirations to do higher-level linguistic analysis, but none of that came to fruition.

We also knew what some of the other subcontractors were doing because we had to make our stuff work with their stuff. One particularly interesting partner was Lincoln Labs, which had created a speech-to-text converter that took audio voice and spit out International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA, not the ale, the script), a code set that enumerates every meaningful sound a human being can make when communicating with another human being. All language sounds from Bushman clicks to the Russian whispering щ (shch) or buzzing ж (zh) have an IPA number and a font element.

We worked on the converter that could match IPA to other script sets. How could this be interesting? Let’s say a machine captured a recording of someone speaking as an analog sound file, and another machine took that and generated a digital IPA file. Our stuff could take the IPA file and match script sets against it until a meaningful language popped out.

What could one do with that? Well, TRW was another subcontractor, and it had created a hardware hammering engine that could compare text strings against each other very fast. Of course, such engines are much faster now, but TRW had state of the art at the time. So, let’s say we’ve got our strings in native text now in whatever language, and we start looking for words like “bomb,” “missile,” “North Korea,” “trigger,” “shipment,” “Iran,” you get the idea, say, within 15 words of each other.

The concept was simple even if the implementation was not. There were fine points (e.g., How would the word Gorbachev look when spoken in Arabic?).

So, now we have a way of snagging audio streams and making them into files, converting those files into the relevant text, and checking that text for interesting words.

Where could the NSA get all those audio files? Well, it had another project call Echelon, which basically captured all communications traffic, clear and otherwise, going over the air (e.g., microwave, satellite) in Europe. Now, that’s a heck of a lot of people to be listening to all at the same time, and the one thing the NSA let slip during a meeting that they probably shouldn’t have was that most of this information went “into the ground unexamined.” In other words, all they were doing was poking around at the haystack in a cursory fashion and moving on to the next haystack.

That was the problem we were trying to solve.

At the other end of the NSA’s process were language specialists of an exceedingly rare breed. They had to know tongues like Yoruba (a West African language) or Tamil (a South Asian) down to the slang and metaphor level AND they had to be able to get a security clearance. The intersection of those two sets is tiny. Essentially, children of American evangelists who grew up natively in those locations while their fathers tried to convert the local residents to Christianity.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/20 ... d-of-us/2/

...

One of the NSA’s operating principles is to “hit ‘em where they ain’t,” to quote Wee Willie Keeler. So, rather than going after heavily encrypted messages in the middle of transmission, for example, the spooks would prefer to simply read the clear text off someone’s screen through his window with a high-power telescope. In the same way, if you don’t know what they can do, you don’t protect against it. Thus, back then, there was lots of clear voice traffic to analyze. Different techniques are required now, what with all the digitization, packetization, and encryption.

So, now we have a dragnet that can capture, if only momentarily, a huge quantity of available conversation in any language and have a machine look at it quickly for a minimum score of “interestingness.” If it reaches that threshold, we flag it and print it out for the endomorphs to take a closer look. If an endomorph marks it as truly interesting, it can be passed up channels for further analysis.

The second news story mentioned way back above, which describes a software program’s ability to write news stories from data, is rather amusing (if you’re not a journalist) in that this technology threatens the jobs of some journalists who thought that a machine couldn’t replace them. More importantly, though, it demonstrates how far computational linguistic analysis has come since Project Etymon. This stuff is rocket science compared to what we could do 20 years ago.

Because the work we did is ancient history, and what we learned wasn’t classified in the first place, I don’t feel as if I’m doing the NSA any particular harm. However, Projects Etymon and Echelon illustrate what could be done two decades ago in terms of mass surveillance. Obviously, hardware is more powerful, software more sophisticated, and communications more evolved today.

The bad guys have also improved their techniques. So, the cat-and-mouse game continues.

But we should be aware that it is feasible — even easy, these days, what with wide data capture, huge data storage (think Amazon cloud services), and powerful data mining — for someone to keep an eye on us all. Machines look for interesting patterns, and people take a closer look at what the machines find.

Did we really do this to ourselves?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerkay/20 ... d-of-us/3/

Statewatch article: RefNo# 28550
UK-USA: 1948 UK-USA agreement and ECHELON states behind "Server in the Sky" project
Statewatch News Online, January 2008

Press coverage reporting that the FBI is seeking to set up a global alliance to target suspected terrorists and criminals has not so far noted the historical origins of "Server in the Sky" project to collect and exchange personal biometrics and data. The group behind the initiative is the "International Information Consortium" comprised of the USA, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The same five states started intelligence gathering in the Cold War era under the 1948 UKUSA agreement which set up a global monitoring system led by the NSA (USA) and Government Communications HQ in the UK (GCHQ).

And the very same five states set up the ECHELON surveillance system in the 1980s which extended communications gathering on a huge scale from military objectives to political and economic targets by trawling the ether for keywords, phrases and groups.

Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments:

"The USA and the UK have been running global surveillance systems since the start of the Cold War through the NSA and GCHQ and their scope was extended by the ECHELON system in the 1980s. For nearly 60 years, since 1948, these hidden systems have been beyond democratic control and now we see this alliance extending its tentacles to cover not just suspected terrorists but criminals as well. Its activities are likely to be as unaccountable as ever, by-passing standards of privacy and data protection."

Background

- European Parliament: Echelon report (pdf)

- Appraisal of technologies of political control (for the EP STOA Committee, pdf)

- European Union and the FBI launch global surveillance system: A Statewatch report, 10 February 1997 (link)

- News report: FBI wants instant access to British identity data - Americans seek international database to carry iris, palm and finger prints (Guardian, link)

http://database.statewatch.org/article.asp?aid=28550

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
_________________________________________
SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIONS ASSESSMENT - STOA
AN APPRAISAL OF TECHNOLOGIES OF POLITICAL CONTROL
Working document (Consultation version)

Luxembourg, 6 January 1998
PE 166 499
Directorate General for Research

Cataloguing data:
Title: An appraisal of technologies for political control
Publisher: European Parliament
Directorate General for Research
Directorate B
The STOA Programme
Author: Mr. Steve Wright - Omega Foundation - Manchester
Editor: Mr. Dick Holdsworth
Head of STOA Unit
Date: 6 January 1998
PE Number: PE 166 499

This document is a working document. The current version is being circulated for consultation. It is not an official publication of STOA or of the European Parliament.
This document does not necessarily represent the views of the European Parliament.

AN APPRAISAL OF THE TECHNOLOGY OF POLITICAL CONTROL

ABSTRACT

The objectives of this report are fourfold: (i) to provide Members of the European Parliament with a guide to recent advances in the technology of political control; (ii) to identify, analyse and describe the current state of the art of the most salient developments; (iii) to present members with an account of current trends, both in Europe and Worldwide; and (iv) to develop policy recommendations covering regulatory strategies for their management and future control.

The report contains seven substantive sections which cover respectively:

(i) The role and function of the technology of political control;

(ii) Recent trends and innovations (including the implications of globalisation, militarisation of police equipment, convergence of control systems deployed worldwide and the implications of increasing technology and decision drift);

(iii) Developments in surveillance technology (including the emergence of new forms of local, national and international communications interceptions networks and the creation of human recognition and tracking devices);

(iv) Innovations in crowd control weapons (including the evolution of a 2nd. generation of so called 'less-lethal weapons' from nuclear labs in the USA).

(v) The emergence of prisoner control as a privatised industry, whilst state prisons face increasing pressure to substitute technology for staff in cost cutting exercises and the social and political implications of replacing policies of rehabilitation with strategies of human warehousing.

(v) The use of science and technology to devise new efficient mark-free interrogation and torture technologies and their proliferation from the US & Europe.

(vi) The implications of vertical and horizontal proliferation of this technology and the need for an adequate political response by the EU, to ensure it neither threatens civil liberties in Europe, nor reaches the hands of tyrants.

The report makes a series of policy recommendations including the need for appropriate codes of practice. It ends by proposing specific areas where further research is needed to make such regulatory controls effective. The report includes a comprehensive bibliographical survey of some of the most relevant literature.

AN APPRAISAL OF THE TECHNOLOGY OF POLITICAL CONTROL

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The objectives of this report are fourfold: (i) to provide Members of the European Parliament with a guide to recent advances in the technology of political control; (ii) to identify. analyze and describe the current state of the art of the most salient developments; (iii) to present members with an account of current trends, both in Europe and Worldwide; and (iv) to develop policy recommendations covering regulatory strategies for their management and future control. The report includes a large selection of illustrations to provide Members of Parliament with a good idea of the scope of current technology together with a representative flavour of what lies on the horizon. The report contains seven substantive sections, which can be summarised as follows:
THE ROLE & FUNCTION OF POLITICAL CONTROL TECHNOLOGIES

This section takes into account the multi-functionality of much of this technology and its role in yielding an extension of the scope, efficiency and growth of policing power. It identifies the continuum of control which stretches from modem law enforcement to advanced state suppression, the difference being the level of democratic accountability in the manner in which such technologies are applied.
RECENT TRENDS & INNOVATIONS

Taking into account the problems of regulation and control and the potential possessed by some of these technologies to undermine international human rights legislation, the section examines recent trends and innovations. This section covers the trend towards militarisation of the police technologies and the paramilitarisation of military technologies with an overall technological and decision drift towards worldwide convergence of nearly all the technologies of political control. Specific advances in area denial, identity recognition, surveillance systems based on neural networks, discreet order vehicles, new arrest and restraint methods and the emergence of so called 'less lethal weapons' are presented. The section also looks at a darker side of technological development including the rise of more powerful restraint, torture, killing and execution technologies and the role of privatised enterprises in promoting it.

The EU is recommended to: (i) develop appropriate structures of accountability to prevent undesirable innovations emerging via processes of technological creep or decision drift; (ii) ensure that the process of adopting new systems for use in internal social and political control is transparent, open to appropriate political scrutiny and subject to democratic change should unwanted or unanticipated consequences emerge; (iii) prohibit, or subject to stringent and democratic controls, any class of technology which has been shown in the past to be excessively injurious, cruel, inhumane or indiscriminate in its effects.
DEVELOPMENTS IN SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY

This section addresses the rapid and virtually unchecked proliferation of surveillance devices and capacity amongst both the private and public sectors. It discusses recent innovations which allow bugging, telephone monitoring, visual surveillance during night or day over large distances and the emergence of new forms of local, national and international communications interceptions networks and the creation of human recognition and tracking devices.

The EU is recommended to subject all surveillance technologies, operations and practices to: (i) procedures ensuring democratic accountability; (ii) proper codes of practice consistent with Data protection legislation to prevent malpractice or abuse; (iii) agreed criteria on what constitutes legitimate surveillance targets, and what does not, and how such surveillance data is stored, processed and shared. These controls should be more effectively targeted at malpractice or illegal tapping by private companies and regulation further tightened to include additional safeguards against abuse as well as appropriate financial redress.

The report discusses a massive telecommunications interceptions network operating within Europe and targeting the telephone, fax and email messages of private citizens, politicians, trade unionists and companies alike. This global surveillance machinery (which is partially controlled by foreign intelligence agencies from outside of Europe) has never been subject to proper parliamentary discussion on its role and function, or the need for limits to be put on the scope and extent of its activities. This section suggests that that time has now arrived and proposes a series of measures to initiate this process of reclaiming democratic accountability over such systems. It is suggested that all telephone interceptions by Member States should be subject to consistent criteria and procedures of public accountability and codes of practice. These should equally apply to devices which automatically create profiles of telephone calls and pattern analysis and require similar legal requirements to those applied for telephone or fax interception.

It is suggested that the rapid proliferation of CCTV systems in many Member States should be subject to a common and consistent set of codes of practice to ensure that such systems are used for the purpose for which they were authorised, that there is an effective assessment and audit of their use annually and an adequate complaints system is in place to deal with any grievances by ordinary people. The report recommends that such codes of practice anticipate technical change including the digital revolution which is currently in process, and ensure that each and every such advance is subject to a formal assessment of both the expected as well as the possible unforeseen implications.
INNOVATIONS IN CROWD CONTROL WEAPONS

This section addresses the evolution of new crowd control weapons, their legitimation, biomedical and political effects. It examines the specific introduction of new chemical, kinetic and electrical weapons, the level of accountability in the decision making and the political use of such technologies to disguise the level of violence being deployed by state security forces. The research used to justify the introduction of such technologies as safe is reanalysed and found to be wanting. Areas covered in more depth include CS and OC gas sprays, rubber and plastic bullets, multi-purpose riot tanks, and the facility of such technologies to exact punishment, with the possibility that they may also bring about anti-state retaliatory aggression which can further destabilise political conflict.

This section briefly analyses recent innovations in crowd control weapons (including the evolution of a 2nd. generation of so called 'less-lethal weapons' from nuclear labs in the USA) and concludes that they are dubious weapons based on dubious and secret research. The Commission should be requested to report to Parliament on the existence of formal liaison arrangements between the EU and the USA to introduce such weapons for use in streets and prisons here. The EU is also recommended to (i) establish objective common criteria for assessing the biomedical effects of all so called less lethal weapons and ensure any future authorization is based on independent research; (ii) ensure that all research used to justify the deployment of any new crowd control weapon in the EU is published in the open scientific press and subject to independent scientific scrutiny, before any authorization is given to deploy. In the meantime the Parliament is asked to reaffirm its current ban on plastic bullets and that all deployment of devices using peppergas (OC) be halted until such a time as independent European research on its risks has been undertaken and published.
NEW PRISON CONTROL SYSTEMS

This section reports on the emergence of prisoner control as a privatised industry, whilst state prisons face increasing pressure to substitute technology for staff in cost cutting exercises. It expresses concern about the social and political implications of replacing policies of rehabilitation with strategies of human warehousing and recommends common criteria for licensing all public and private prisons within the EU. At minimum this should cover operators responsibilities and prisoners rights in regard to rehabilitation requirements; UN Minimum Treatment of Prisoners rules banning the use of leg irons; the regulation and use of psychotropic drugs to control prisoners; the use of riot control, prisoner transport, restraint and extraction technologies. The report recommends a ban on (i) all automatic, mass. indiscriminate prisoner punishment technologies using less lethal instruments such as chemical

irritant or baton rounds; (ii) kill fencing and lethal area denial systems; and (iii) all use of electro-shock, stun and electric restraint technology until and unless independent medical evidence can prove that it safe and will not contribute to either deaths in custody or inhumane treatment, torture or other cruel and unusual punishments.
INTERROGATION, TORTURE TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES

This section discusses the use of science and technology to devise new efficient mark-free interrogation and torture technologies and their proliferation from the US & Europe. Of particular concern is the use and abuse of electroshock devices and their proliferation. It is recommended that the commercial sale of both training in counter terror operations and any equipment which might be used in torture and execution, should be controlled by the criteria and measures outlined in the next section.
REGULATION OF HORIZONTAL PROLIFERATION

The implications for civil liberties and human rights of both the vertical and horizontal proliferation of this technology are literally awesome. There is a pressing need for an adequate political response by the EU, to ensure it neither threatens civil liberties in Europe, nor reaches the hands of tyrants. The European Council agreed in Luxembourg in 1991 and in Lisbon in 1992 a set of eight Common Criteria for Arms Exports which set out conditions which should govern all decisions relating to the issue of licences for the export of arms and ammunition, one condition of which was "the respect of human rights in the country of final destination." Other conditions also relate to the overall protection of human rights. However these eight criteria are not binding on member states and there is no common interpretation on how they should be most effectively implemented. However, a code of conduct to achieve such an agreement was drawn up and endorsed by over 1000 Non-Governmental Organizations based in the European Union.

Whilst it is recognised that it is not the role of existing EU institutions to implement such measures as vetting and issuing of export licences, which are undertaken by national agencies of the EU Member States, it has been suggested by Amnesty International that the joint action procedure which was used to establish EU regulations on Export of Dual use equipment could be used to take such a code of practice further.

Amnesty suggest that the EU Member States should use the Joint Action procedures to draw up common lists of (i) proscribed military, security and police equipment and technology, the sole or primary use of which is to contribute to human rights violations; (ii) sensitive types of military, security or police equipment and technology which has been shown in practice to be used for human rights violations; and (iii) military, security and police units and forces which have been sufficiently responsible for human rights violations and to whom sensitive goods and services should not be provided. The report makes recommendations to help facilitate this objective of denying repressive regimes access to advanced repression technologies made or supplied from Europe.
FURTHER RESEARCH

The report concludes by proposing a series of areas where new research is required including: (i) advanced area denial and less-lethal weapon systems; (ii) human identity recognition and tracking technologies; (iii) the deployment of 'dum-dum' ammunition within the EU; (iv) the constitutional issues raised by the U.S. National Security Agency's access and facility to intercept all European telecommunications; (v) the social and political implications of further privatisation of the technologies of political control and (vi) the extent to which European based companies have been complicit in supplying equipment used for torture or other human rights violations and what new independent measures might be instituted to track such transfers.

CONTENTS

Abstract
Executive Summary
Acknowledgements
Table of Charts and Figures
1 Introduction 1
2 Role and Function of Political Control Technologies 3
3 Recent Trends and Innovations 6
4 Developments in Surveillance Technology 15
5 Innovations in Crowd Control Weapons 22
6 New Prison Control Systems 40
7 Interrogation, Torture Techniques and Technologies 44
8 Regulation of Horizontal Proliferation 53
9 Conclusions 59
10 Notes and References 60
11 Bibliography [Separate file (85K); Zip-compressed version 32K] 73
Appendix 1. Military, Security & Police Fairs. [Not provided with report]

MORE: http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm

AN APPRAISAL OF THE TECHNOLOGIES OF POLITICAL CONTROL

An Omega Foundation Summary & Options Report
For The European Parliament

SEPTEMBER 1998

CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

2. THE ROLE & FUNCTION OF POLITICAL CONTROL TECHNOLOGIES

3. RECENT TRENDS & INNOVATIONS

3.1 Policy Options

4. INNOVATIONS IN CROWD CONTROL WEAPONS

4.1 Policy Options

5. NEW PRISON CONTROL SYSTEMS

5.1 Policy Options

6. INTERROGATION, TORTURE TECHNIQUES & TECHNOLOGIES

6.1 Policy Options

7. DEVELOPMENTS IN SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY

7.1 Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) Surveillance Networks
7.2 Algorithmic Surveillance Systems
7.3 Bugging & Tapping Devices
7.4 National & International Communications Interceptions Networks

7.4.1 NSA Interception of All EU Telecommunications
7.4.2 EU-FBI Global Telecommunications Surveillance System

7.5 Policy Options

8. REGULATION OF HORIZONTAL PROLIFERATION

8.1 Policy Options

9. CONCLUSIONS

NOTES

ANNEX 1 - BIBLIOGRAPHY

MORE: http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc-so.htm

Meme-Tracking / Meme-Jacking
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29642

Wombaticus Rex wrote:ECHELON is mostly bluster? Do you have any sources on that? Not like "fuck you" more like "arf??" That EU report was making it sound pretty fucking impressive.

elfismiles wrote:

Meme-Tracking / Meme-Jacking
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29642

Wombaticus Rex wrote:ECHELON is mostly bluster? Do you have any sources on that? Not like "fuck you" more like "arf??" That EU report was making it sound pretty fucking impressive.

RI forum search "ECHELON"
search.php?keywords=echelon&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sk=t&sd=d&sr=topics

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FBI to launch nationwide facial recognition service
By Aliya Sternstein 10/07/2011
www.nextgov.com

The FBI by mid-January will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov.

The federal government is embarking on a multiyear, $1 billion dollar overhaul of the FBI's existing fingerprint database to more quickly and accurately identify suspects, partly through applying other biometric markers, such as iris scans and voice recordings.

Often law enforcement authorities will "have a photo of a person and for whatever reason they just don't know who it is [but they know] this is clearly the missing link to our case," said Nick Megna, a unit chief at the FBI's criminal justice information services division. The new facial recognition service can help provide that missing link by retrieving a list of mug shots ranked in order of similarity to the features of the subject in the photo.

Today, an agent would have to already know the name of an individual to pull up the suspect's mug shot from among the 10 million shots stored in the bureau's existing Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Using the new Next-Generation Identification system that is under development, law enforcement analysts will be able to upload a photo of an unknown person; choose a desired number of results from two to 50 mug shots; and, within 15 minutes, receive identified mugs to inspect for potential matches. Users typically will request 20 candidates, Megna said. The service does not provide a direct match.

Michigan, Washington, Florida and North Carolina will participate in a test of the new search tool this winter before it is offered to criminal justice professionals across the country in 2014 as part of NGI. The project, which was awarded to Lockheed Martin Corp. in 2008, already has upgraded the FBI's fingerprint matching service.

Local authorities have the choice to file mug shots with the FBI as part of the booking process. The bureau expects its collection of shots to rival its repository of 70 million fingerprints once more officers are aware of the facial search's capabilities.

Thomas E. Bush III, who helped develop NGI's system requirements when he served as assistant director of the CJIS division between 2005 and 2009, said, "The idea was to be able to plug and play with these identifiers and biometrics." Law enforcement personnel saw value in facial recognition and the technology was maturing, said the 33-year FBI veteran who now serves as a private consultant.

NGI's incremental construction seems to align with the White House's push to deploy new information technology in phases so features can be scrapped if they don't meet expectations or run over budget.

But immigrant rights groups have raised concerns that the Homeland Security Department, which exchanges digital prints with the FBI, will abuse the new facial recognition component. Currently, a controversial DHS immigrant fingerprinting program called Secure Communities runs FBI prints from booked offenders against the department's IDENT biometric database to check whether they are in the country illegally. Homeland Security officials say they extradite only the most dangerous aliens, including convicted murderers and rapists. But critics say the FBI-DHS print swapping ensnares as many foreigners as possible, including those whose charges are minor or are ultimately dismissed.

Megna said Homeland Security is not part of the facial recognition pilot. But, Bush said in the future NGI's data, including the photos, will be accessible by Homeland Security's IDENT.

The planned addition of facial searches worries Sunita Patel, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who said, "Any database of personal identity information is bound to have mistakes. And with the most personal immutable traits like our facial features and fingerprints, the public can't afford a mistake."

In addition, Patel said she is concerned about the involvement of local police in information sharing for federal immigration enforcement purposes. "The federal government is using local cops to create a massive surveillance system," she said.

Bush said, "We do have the capability to search against each other's systems," but added, "if you don't come to the attention of law enforcement you don't have anything to fear from these systems."

Other civil liberties advocates questioned whether the facial recognition application would retrieve mug shots of those who have simply been arrested. "It might be appropriate to have nonconvicted people out of that system," said Jim Harper, director of information policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. FBI officials declined to comment on the recommendation.

Harper also noted large-scale searches may generate a lot of false positives, or incorrect matches. Facial recognition "is more accurate with a Google or a Facebook, because they will have anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen pictures of an individual, whereas I imagine the FBI has one or two mug shots," he said.

FBI officials would not disclose the name of the search product or the vendor, but said they gained insights on the technique's accuracy by studying research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

In responding to concerns about the creation of a Big Brother database for tracking innocent Americans, Megna said the system will not alter the FBI's authorities or the way it conducts business. "This doesn't change or create any new exchanges of data," he said. "It only provides [law enforcement] with a new service to determine what photos are of interest to them."

In 2008, the FBI released a privacy impact assessment summarizing its appraisal of controls in place to ensure compliance with federal privacy regulations. Megna said that, during meetings with the CJIS Advisory Policy Board and the National Crime Prevention and Privacy Compact Council, "we haven't gotten a whole lot of pushback on the photo capability."

The FBI has an elaborate system of checks and balances to guard fingerprints, palm prints, mug shots and all manner of criminal history data, he said.

"This is not something where we want to collect a bunch of surveillance film" and enter it in the system, Megna said. "That would be useless to us. It would be useless to our users."

Harvey wrote:If they need to know so much, perhaps the simplest explanation is that their fear is as great as ours. I know we all know this around here, but reflection itself is having what we already know re-iterated from a deeper pool.

I'm confident that the vast majority of what they'll find, being useless shite, will ease their fears somewhat. Perhaps their very power may allow them to realise they don't need it.

tazmic wrote:THE FUTURE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

Abstract ~ Evolutionary development is sometimes thought of as exhibiting an inexorable trend towards higher, more complex, and normatively worthwhile forms of life. This paper explores some dystopian scenarios where freewheeling evolutionary developments, while continuing to produce complex and intelligent forms of organization, lead to the gradual elimination of all forms of being that we care about. We then consider how such catastrophic outcomes could be avoided and argue that under certain conditions the only possible remedy would be a globally coordinated policy to control human evolution by modifying the fitness function of future intelligent life forms.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html

Too much worth quoting. Here's a mixup:

Contrary to the Panglossian view, current evidence does not warrant any great confidence in the belief that the default course of future human evolution points in a desirable direction. In particular, we have examined a couple of dystopian scenarios in which evolutionary competition leads to the extinction of the life forms we regard as valuable. Intrinsically worthwhile experience could turn out not to be adaptive in the future.

The only way to avoid these outcomes, if they do indeed represent the default trajectory, is to assume control over evolution. It was argued that this would require the creation of a singleton. The singleton would lack external competitors, and its decision mechanism would be sufficiently integrated to enable it to solve internal coordination problems, in particular the problem of how to reshape the fitness function for its internal agent ecology to favor eudaemonic types. A mere local power could also attempt to do this, but it would thereby decrease its competitiveness and ensure its own eventual demise. Long-term control of evolution requires global coordination.

A singleton need not be a monolith (except in the trivial sense that has some kind of mechanism or decision procedure that enables it to solve internal coordination problems). There are many possible singleton constitutions: a singleton could be a democratic world government, a benevolent and overwhelmingly powerful superintelligent machine, a world dictatorship, a stable alliance of leading powers, or even something as abstract as a generally diffused moral code that included provisions for ensuring its own stability and enforcement.

Increased social transparency, such as may result from advances in surveillance technology or lie detection, could facilitate the development of a singleton. Deliberate international political initiatives could also lead to the gradual emergence of a singleton, and such initiatives might be dramatically catalyzed by ‘wild card’ events such as a series of cataclysms that highlighted the disadvantages of a fractured world order.

At the other end of the NSA’s process were language specialists of an exceedingly rare breed. They had to know tongues like Yoruba (a West African language) or Tamil (a South Asian) down to the slang and metaphor level AND they had to be able to get a security clearance. The intersection of those two sets is tiny. Essentially, children of American evangelists who grew up natively in those locations while their fathers tried to convert the local residents to Christianity.

Nick Bostrom wrote: this would require the creation of a singleton.

Singleton (global governance)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In futurology, a singleton is a hypothetical world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level, capable of exerting effective control over its domain, and permanently preventing both internal and external threats to its supremacy. The term seems to have been first defined by Nick Bostrom.[1]

An artificial general intelligence having undergone an intelligence explosion could form a singleton, as could a world government armed with mind control and social surveillance technologies. A singleton need not directly micromanage everything in its domain; it could allow diverse forms of organization within itself, albeit guaranteed to function within strict parameters. A singleton need not support a civilization, and in fact could obliterate it upon coming to power.

A singleton has both potential risks and potential benefits. Notably, a suitable singleton could solve world coordination problems that would not otherwise be solvable, opening up otherwise unavailable developmental trajectories for civilization. For example, Bostrom suggests that a singleton could hold Darwinian evolutionary pressures in check, preventing agents interested only in reproduction from coming to dominate.[2]

Yet Bostrom also regards the possibility of a stable, repressive, totalitarian global regime as a serious existential risk.[3] The very stability of a singleton makes the installation of a bad singleton especially catastrophic, since the consequences can never be undone. Bryan Caplan writes that "perhaps an eternity of totalitarianism would be worse than extinction".[4]

FBI Monitoring News Talk Radio for Investigations

Mark Weaver
WMAL.com

WASHINGTON -- If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might be recorded by the FBI.

The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet.

The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.

"This doesn't give us any enhanced capability, prying into or any 'big brother' concerns because this is information that's being put out on the airwaves," FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told WMAL.com. "Its very important to our investigators to know what's being reported."

Bresson cites as an example of the case of the Times Square bomber.

"It's ideal for cases like that because we can extract information that's already been reported and help our investigators make better decisions."

http://www.wmal.com/Article.asp?id=2307652

The FBI tunes in to radio.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is rolling tape. The federal agency has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find via the internet. The FBI says it’s not out to police the airwaves, but rather have access to what airs as potential evidence.

http://www.insideradio.com/article.asp?id=2307050