[lbo-talk] Your Info Is On File ( Was Re: Hill refines her posish on war)

[andie nachgeborenen]

Actually among the scariest aspects of all this is
that these sweeps are likely to be highly inaccurate,
both as to content and storage, since they are done
undiscriminatingly by machines, and as to hypotheical
future use if someone is "targeted." The prospects are
gruesomely indicated in Terry Guillam's Brazil, where,
in a Total Information Awareness society, thye chain
of events is set in motion when a glitch in processing
leads to the security forces' apprehension, torture,
and execution of a random victim. I have little faith
in the successful operation of ditigal technology even
when closely supervised, so in many ways I think the
threat is less a matter of the authority's ability to
quickly locate, collate, and deploy this data that is
somewhere in their hard drives against a person chosen
to be a target -- hell, if it comes to a Brazil or
1984 state, why think they will bother with nicety's
like "building a case" against you? -- than in the
terror of random arrests and disappearances which such
technology could faciliate.

--- Dwayne Monroe <idoru345 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> Jordan:
> 
> 
> The big point about the current direction the
> surveillance is headed is that it's not even
> targeted:
> it's just a sweep of all the bits at all the places
> that are available.  That phone call you made today
> will not be the subject of an investigation.  But it
> will be available in the future, when you do step
> out
> of line, in whatever way you will.
> 
> ..................
> 
> 
> Precisely right.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Contemporary forms of "surveillance" are built upon
> cheap data storage and ubiquitous computing.  As you
> say Jordan, immediate 'investigation' has little to
> do
> with it; 'data harvesting' and 'data warehousing'
> for
> potential future use are the actual goals.
> 
> 
> This was the design assumption of the Total
> Information Awareness program (officially killed,
> but
> lingering in an undead state, its spirit scattered
> across various smaller efforts).  
> 
> 
> Imagine a massively parallel data storage network,
> not
> like Google's, dedicated to logging electronically
> traceable actions -- phone calls, emails, credit and
> debit card transactions, flights, etc.
> 
> 
> Now, stop imagining and realize that this is what
> has
> been made possible by inexpensive, high gigabytage
> hard drives, improved search algorithms and
> relatively
> cheap, yet remarkably powerful CPUs.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> .d.
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>
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