[lbo-talk] the matrix

dredmond at efn.org dredmond at efn.org
Thu Aug 7 20:36:51 PDT 2003


Quoting Eubulides <paraconsistent at comcast.net>:


> U.S. Backs Florida's New Counterterrorism Database
> 'Matrix' Offers Law Agencies Faster Access to Americans' Personal Records
> By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
> Washington Post Staff Writer
>
> Technical challenges include ensuring that data are accurate and that the
> system can be updated frequently.

This sounds like a pure scam. If you're assembling a database on zillions of ordinary citizens, what they own, where they live -- well, the storage/retrieval requirements are, as the mathematicians like to say, nontrivial.


> concerns about his past, according to law enforcement sources. The Chicago
> Tribune reported in 1987 that court documents in a federal drug case said
> defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who identified Asher as a pilot and onetime
> smuggler, offered him as an informant.
> Asher has also donated services to the FBI, the Secret Service and other
> agencies. And authorities credit Seisint with helping to turn up links
> among the hijackers who slammed planes into the Pentagon and the World
> Trade Center, and to some of their associates.

Bingo. A former spook neck-deep in 1980s drug deals (can you say... Spawn of Contra?) claims to have The Greatest Software Ever Created, and the product is just so incredibly and innovative and mind-blowing that we're not allowed to see any actual code. [Insert Jon Stewart logo.] "Riiiiggght..."


> Former Secret Service head Brian Stafford recently went to work as a
> senior executive at Seisint.

Weren't the praetorian guards the first to sack Rome?

-- DRR



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