NSA Shopping For Data Mining Tech 159
prostoalex writes "The National Security Agency paid a visit to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the New York Times learned, to talk about potentially 'interesting' technologies that the Feds would be interested in purchasing. Data mining technologies that could link arbitrary facts into logical events and find dependencies, technologies for quick voice transcription - all these technologies usually get to market faster if developed by private companies."
High Tech Ntional Security (Score:2, Interesting)
Technician Strike (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm hearing more and more about the idea of a national strike.
We technicians bitch and complain about this kind of flagrant privacy violation.
It would be much more difficult for these people, I'd think, if there were some sort of technician union that had technical rights as well as civil rights as part of its platform.
It's real simple:
1) Don't help these fucks in any way.
2) Harm them in any way you can get away with. Small needling, over and over again. Refusal to cooperate. Take their money and do nothing.
Re:I can give them that (Score:2, Interesting)
Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle: stopped at the first motel we passed, an arbitrary choice.
"Abitrary facts" within its context could also mean "a set of facts chosen from a larger set of facts at random".
I think "seemingly unrelated facts" is what they really meant to say.
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
But I used to. I used to march lockstep with my fellow Marines, wanting only a chance to use my rifle, or its bayonet, on some terrorist bent on destroying all I hold dear.
I value my privacy, too. But there's a difference between what I do in private (or even a semi-public area like a restaurant or pseudonominous posting on a blog) and what I do in public.
If someone stands on the corner shouting "Down with America! We will blow up your orphanages, unholy capitalist swine!", I'd like to know who he is and whether he's actually in contact with anyone else. If there's no "we", then he's just a nutcase and can be told so and otherwise ignored.
But if that fellow is in contact with others doing the same thing, I'd like to know about it. I'd like the government to defend my liberty by infringing his.
Similarly, if he's smart enough just to be in contact with his terrorist buddies, I'd like the government to know it so he doesn't get a chance to blow up Disneyworld or something.
I want the government to sift through all publicly available information to find people planning or engaged in activities which would cause me or another 2,966 of my countrymen to be deprived of life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
So take your "strike", and your call for people to interfere with government's only legitimate role, and
NSA is very sharp (Score:3, Interesting)
The NSA is made up of very smart and capable folks. Give them a budget and incentives, and they can probably do a pretty good job of sticking their noses into the public's affairs.
Sadly for our privacy, the US has no real concept of data privacy. If you've bought something and told someone, they can tell the NSA.
So if the data is available, the NSA can just go out and but it. That's perfectly fine, but it means the NSA can easily acquire mind-bogglingly large amounts of data. Also, the phone company (AT&T) has no qualms cooperating with the govt. It isn't like Google, willing to fight it out in court. Just about nobody is -- so the NSA has an easy time, if it wants to get the goods on you.