snip

All I can say to that, to the horrible images conjured, is "ewg!!"

Waterboarding is so much kinder...but it does lend ideas to a really
incredible version of the Aristocrats....

"Dildeaux" <dildeaux@toys.com> wrote in message

Academia Signs Up To
Track Down Dissent
By Chris Floyd
10-17-6

Why is the United States government spending millions of dollars to track down critics of
George W. Bush in the press? And why have major American universities agreed to put this
technology of tyranny into the state's hands?

   At the most basic level, of course, both questions are easily answered: 1) Power. 2) Money.
The Bush administration wants to be able to root out - and counteract - any dissenting noises
that might put a crimp in its ongoing crusade for "full spectrum dominance" of global affairs,
while the august institutions of higher learning involved - the universities of Cornell,
Pittsburgh and Utah - crave the federal green that keeps them in clover.

   But beyond these grubby realities, there are many other disturbing aspects of this new
program - which is itself only part of a much broader penetration of American academia by the
Department of Homeland Security.

   As with so many of the Bush measures that have quietly stripped away America's liberties,
this one too is beginning with a whimper, not a bang: a modest $2.4 Department of Homeland
Security million grant to develop "sentiment analysis" software that will allow the
government's "security organs" to sift millions of articles for "negative opinions of the
United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas," as the New York
Times reported earlier this month. Such negative opinions must be caught and catalogued because
they could pose "potential threats to the nation," security apparatchiks told the Times.

   This hydra-headed snooping program is based on "information extraction," which, as a
chipper PR piece from Cornell tells us, is a process by which "computers scan text to find
meaning in natural language," rather than the rigid literalism ordinarily demanded by silicon
cogitators. Under the gentle tutelage of Homeland Security, the universities "will use
machine-learning algorithms to give computers examples of text expressing both fact and opinion
and teach them to tell the difference," says the Cornell blurb.

   At this point, the ancient and ever-pertinent question of Pontius Pilate comes to mind:
"What is truth?" Of course, Pilate, being a devotee of what George W. Bush likes to call "the
path of action," gave the answer to his philosophical inquiry in brute physical form: truth is
whatever the empire says it is - so take this Galilean rabble-rouser out and crucify him
already. In like manner, it will certainly be the government "security organs" who ultimately
determine the criteria for what is fact and what is opinion - and whether the latter is
positive or negative, perhaps even a candidate for the Bush-Pilate "path."

   The academics will be trying out the Sentiment Analysis program (let's call it SAP, for
short) on four main clusters of articles from 2001-2002, the Times reports. These include:
Bush's famous declaration of an "axis of evil" threatening the world; the treatment of his
Terror War captives in Guantanamo Bay; global warming; and the failed Bush-backed bid to topple
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in a coup - all of them issues on which the Bush administration was at
odds with much of the world, and large swathes of American opinion as well. Obviously, such
issues are fertile fields for terrorist thought-crimes to be snagged and tagged by SAP.

   For those with concerns about civil liberties, Cornell assures us that SAP will be limited
strictly to foreign publications. Oh, really? Hands up out there, everyone who believes that
this technology will not be used to ferret out "potential threats to the nation" arising in the
Homeland press as well. After all, the Unitary Executive Decider-in-Chief has already decided
that the nation's iron-clad laws against warrantless surveillance of American citizens can be
swept aside by his "inherent powers" if he decides it's necessary. Why should he bother with
any petty restrictions on a press-monitoring program? And wouldn't dissension within the ranks
of the volk itself actually be more threatening to government policy than the grumbling of
malcontents overseas?

   II.

   Then again, what is so sinister about the plan, exactly? Surely every government is eager
to read its notices in the press, foreign and domestic. Surely the Bush administration already
has a myriad of minions in the White House, the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and embassies around the
world doing just that. True enough - and there's the rub. For if they are already tracking and
sifting media sentiment to a fare-thee-well, why do they need SAP's $2.4 million software?

   Here we see the same principle that lies behind Bush's illegal warrantless surveillance
program. Long-established law - the FISA court - already provides Bush with the power to spy on
anyone even remotely suspected of a connection to terrorism - and to do so immediately, without
waiting a single instant or jumping through a single bureaucratic hoop to get the operation
going. So who is he actually using his warrantless surveillance program against? It can't be
suspected terrorists; they are already covered by existing law. There are only two conclusions
to be drawn from this strange state of affairs: 1) The Bush regime is using the program to spy
on people other than suspected terrorists. 2) It is using the program to establish the
principle that presidential power cannot be restrained by law in any area that the president
arbitrarily designates a "matter of national security." These conclusions are not mutually
exclusive, of course.

   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.

   The key to this conundrum mostly likely lies in the envisioned scope of the program:
"millions of articles" to be processed for "sentiment analysis." This denotes a fishing
expedition that goes far beyond the "publicly available material, primarily news reports and
editorials from English-language newspapers worldwide" that Claire Cardie, Cornell's lead
researcher on SAP, says that her team will be using in developing the software. The target of
such a scope cannot be simply the English-language foreign press, or the foreign press as a
whole, or indeed, every newspaper in the world, from Pyongyang to Peoria. It must also be aimed
at other modes of textual communication, in print and online.

   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."

   This research program will draw on such areas as "knowledge representation, uncertainty
quantification, high-performance computing architectures" - and our old friends, information
extraction and natural language processing. It is in fact closely associated with the
"sentiment analysis" work being done by the Cornell group - and note that the Rutgers
consortium is designing its info-gobbling software to deal with "numerous sources" of
information. Do we sense some synergy going on here?

   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.

   These include the "Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic
Enhancement" (ADVISE) program, which can rip and read mountains of open source data - such as
web sites and databases, as analyst Michael Hampton reports. Two Democratic Congressmen, David
Obey of Wisconsin and Martin Slabo of Minnesota, have asked the General Accounting Office to
investigate the program for possible intrusions on privacy rights, Hampton notes.

   While Congressional concern for privacy is all well and good, we know that it means nothing
to the Unitary Executive. Earlier this month, Bush used his "signing statement" magic wand to
wave away a direct Congressional mandate for reports on whether Homeland Security is obeying
privacy laws in compiling its secret "watch lists," which increasingly control more and more
aspects of American life, including "who gets on planes, who gets government jobs, who gets
employed," as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
told AP. Using the by-now ritualistic language of presidential dictatorship, Bush's statement
said he would ignore Congress's direct order and delay, alter or simply quash the privacy
reports as he saw fit.

   You don't need a machine-learning algorithm or $2.4 million worth of Ivy League software to
connect the dots here. The Bush administration already has spyware devouring reams of private
information in every direction. It is now paying top universities millions of dollars to refine
this data into actionable intelligence - including the automated discernment and tracking of
dissent against administration policies and criticism of the president. Bush has openly
declared that he has no intention of obeying privacy laws - or any other laws safeguarding the
Constitutional rights of American citizens - if he doesn't want to.

   And if that's not sinister enough for you, consider this: on Tuesday George W. Bush signed
the "Military Commissions Act," which states that he can arbitrarily declare anyone - yes,
American citizens included - an "unlawful enemy combatant" for any action that he arbitrarily
decides constitutes "material support" to terrorists. He can imprison these "UECs" without
charge or trial, for the duration of the "War on Terror," which he and Dick Cheney have already
assured us will not end "in our lifetime." He can subject these captives to "strenuous
interrogation techniques" that by any sane reckoning constitute torture - but this same Act
allows Bush himself to determine what is legally torture and what is not, except in the most
extreme cases, such as rape and deliberate murder.

   A regime openly committed to wielding arbitrary power over the life and liberty of every
person on earth is now equipping itself with intrusive technology beyond the wildest dreams of
the most totalitarian states in history. And some of the nation's most respected educational
institutions - proud bastions of civilization and enlightenment - are helping them do it. It is
simply impossible that such a system will not be mightily abused.

   And for all you SAP machines out there: that conclusion is a fact, not an opinion.

   Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues
all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the
Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of
Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor
of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.

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