Academia To Assist Homeland Security In Tracking Dissenters

[Jcrowley]

Likewise, we must ask: who is the "Sentiment Analysis" program aimed at? It can't be the major news and opinion drivers in the international and national media; these are already being monitored. And it hardly requires a deus ex machina to determine the political sentiment behind news stories and opinion pieces. Why then would you need multimillion-dollar computer whizbangery to tell you whether a story casts a favorable or critical light on Bush and his policies? And how could critical "sentiment" in the kinds of stories that Cornell, Pitt and Utah are examining in their tests pose any kind of "potential threat" to the nation? Again, there must be something else behind the program because, as with warrantless surveillance, it is clearly redundant on its face.

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In fact, later in the PR blurb, Cardie rather gives the game away when, seeking to allay "fears about invasions of privacy" raised by the research, she notes that "the techniques would have to be changed considerably to work on documents like e-mails." Yes; and an intercontinental ballistic missile is just a big, shiny, harmless rocket - until you load it with a nuclear weapon and fire it at somebody. No doubt Cardie is simply a dedicated scientist, focused on the technical problem at hand, and her naivetè on this point is genuine; but once you have built a platform that can churn through millions of pieces of text to uncover criticism and dissent - however the organs deign to define these concepts - then this technology can certainly be adapted to launch all-encompassing "sentiment analysis" against any form of written communication you please.

Nor is this program being developed in isolation. It is part of a larger Homeland Security push "to conduct research on advanced methods for information analysis and to develop computational technologies that contribute to securing the homeland," as a DHS press release puts it, in announcing the formation of yet another university consortium. This group - led by Rutgers, and including the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois and, once again, Pitt - has pulled down a whopping $10.2 million to "identify common patterns from numerous sources of information" that "may be indicative of" - what else? - "potential threats to the nation."

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III.
The Cornell and Rutgers groups are two of four "University Affiliate Centers" thus far established by Homeland Security. All of the consortiums are geared toward the amassing, storing and analysis of unimaginably vast amounts of information, gathered relentlessly from a multitude of sources and formats. They are in turn just part of a still-larger panorama of "data mining" programs being developed - or already in use - by the security organs.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=887&Itemid=135