The Government's Massive Data Sweep

[rumpel]

By Mark Clayton, Christian Science Monitor. Posted May 15, 2006.

A 'dataveillance' program within the Department of Homeland Security is sifting through millions of online records to note user patterns and possible links to terrorism.

Editor's Note: The following article was published in the Christian Science Monitor on Feb. 9, 2006. We think it is even more relevant today, amid revelations that the NSA has been routinely collecting the telephone call records of millions of Americans.

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

The system -- parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development -- is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.

"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots -- analyzing and aggregating them -- in a way that we haven't thought about. It's one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with."

The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.

more
http://www.alternet.org/story/36190/

[LibertyorDeath]

1. Americans better stand up and stop this .

Before they start rounding up your neighbor's and friends.

The mark of all Authoritarian states spying on their own people.

[rumpel]

2. and Danny Schechter posts today:

The convergence between the telcos and the internet, the broadcasters and the broadbanders is birthing a new media world. But it's not just the old media that is at risk. Our democracy is imperiled, and not just by the unchecked power of big government. The corporate world lurks in the shadows here. They are the "men behind the curtain." It is our our job as concerned citizens to take crises like the ones now surfacing and deepen them and raise bloody hell before their new technologies take us backward into the future.

Hobbes' “Leviathan” begat Orwell's “1984” and Huxley's “Brave New World.” His worries are still timely, and, as Billmon intimates, it offers a vision of chickens -- and chicken hawks -- playing "gobble, gobble" with our freedoms and our lives.

"Having entrusted their security and their liberties to the beast," he writes, "Leviathan's subjects will be lucky not to wind up like Jonah, lodged in its belly."

http://www.alternet.org/story/36280/

[TrogL]

3. '1984' or 'Brazil'

Take your pick