Poindexter? - Page 2

Cairo · 11-21-2002, 01:18 AM

Hi Nic Name,
Does it bother me that for years now, any individual layperson who cares to can access any public information on me if they want to? Not really. Does it bother me that our Agencies are forbidden to do what I, and everybody and their mother....even Agents themselves off duty can do?
Yes, because terrorists use this bureaucratic nonsense to kill us.
The private information on me STILL needs a Judges court order to access.

Nic Name · 11-21-2002, 01:45 AM

Cairo,

I think we are discussing two distinct situations.

Poindexter is developing for the DOD a system for scanning aggregated data to flag patterns of behavior and then identify individuals who would be persons of interest.

You are suggesting that there are judicial safeguards for the surveillance of individuals, similar to seeking a search warrant or wire tap.

Of course, you understand that Poindexter's system of surveillance is not going to require judicial authority to run patterns of suspicious activities against the database to determine "persons of interest" and that no judicial order need be sought to keep an eye on such persons by following, enquiring of neighbors and employers, etc.

If wiretapping or other invasion of privacy is deemed desirable by the Agency, the judges who will authorize such will be nameless faceless judges of a secret court, who will not hear any submissions except from the Attorney General, if current practises are any indication.

If a person is arrested he may be held without legal representation or charge at the discretion of the Commander in Chief, as in the case of Padilla. (Is he still alive? Does anyone know or care?)

I'm feeling better already.

juju · 11-21-2002, 01:48 AM

Hey Cairo, your posts are formatted very strangely. Is this intentional? How about some nice, neat paragraphs?

jaguar · 11-21-2002, 01:56 AM

Quote:

Being on a watchlist doesn't necessarily damage a person or their reputation, but I would lean towards it not helping you.

Anyone say Macarthy?

So Ciaro your argument is only terrorists babykillers and evil rapists should fear total destruction of remaining privacy because everyone else has nothing to hide right?

Of course it was a lack of legal powers not one-upmanship and human incompetence that cause an intel failure, of course not.

Quote:

Hey Cairo, your posts are formatted very strangely. Is this intentional? Whatever happened to nice, neat paragraphs?

I would have thought he would have alligned them to the far right, not the left.

slang · 11-21-2002, 02:19 AM

Hermit22

First para - good point, I agree but think they're still too interested in chasing recreational pot smokers and technical violations of gun regs. while flatly ignoring foreign terror evidence.

Second - completely agree, not required, streamline

mindless ramble? Never stopped me

Juju
(sharp sarcasm) Come on now.....no one was ever CONVICTED of spying for China

Nic Name

Quote:

Doesn't it really bother you that they seriously want to connect the "dots" between what books you take out of the library or buy on Amazon

So....all I need to do is set up an alias to buy my next copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

Quote:

If wiretapping or other invasion of privacy is deemed desirable by the Agency, the judges who will authorize such will be nameless faceless judges of a secret court, who will not hear any submissions except from the Attorney General, if current practises are any indication.

I agree 100%
nice post, not too long (like mine) well layed out.

Cairo

Quote:

As our system is now, after a murder occurs the authorities track databases and find that indeed the perpetrator did buy garbage bags,an axe,rags, and heavy duty floor cleaner at 3:00 AM....after the fact. I bet the victim would have been grateful (albeit maybe even still ALIVE) if authorities had a clue before the murder.

The answer to all the world's problems is a good defensive handgun.

Quote:

it's reaching to think that Saddam would sell nuclear capability to terrorists to bring America to it's knees, etc,etc....Really?

I have been unable to provide credible evidence that that may happen but if it does, I'm not sharing my long term storage MREs and disaster survival gear with anyone carrying a Democratic voting card (unless she's got ammo).

I don't feel good about this accountability because of the whole SS number and it's evolution, hope your right about the judges.

Nice to have you here at the cellar Cairo.

Quote:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. - 1984. George Orwell

jaguar · 11-21-2002, 08:01 AM

Hermit could you post the paper, or the part on netwar? The concept interests me.

hermit22 · 11-21-2002, 11:43 AM

There's an entire RAND book about it, and that's probably the best source.

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1382/

Pay special attention to Chapters 1 and 10.

Netwar is especially interesting if you know a bit about computers and networks. The basic idea is that the networked structure exists on the organizational, doctrinal and tactical levels in the most successful modern terrorist organizations. al-Qaeda, for example, is both a "hub and spoke" arrangement, with the cells communicating directly with one central command and a "wheel" arrangement, wherein they can communicate with any other cell in the network directly. Interesting stuff.

Bitman · 11-21-2002, 05:27 PM

You people seem to be missing the big picture -- Our government's purpose is to prevent all crime before it happens. As the Foundering Fathers said, "better 1000 innocent men go to jail than one guilty man be freed." (I believe they said something else, but that's what they meant, hence the 'foundering'.) They didn't have the ability to do this back then, but today our computers are fast enough and large enough to track the info needed to prevent crime. And over time, the database will improve, and fewer innocents will be bagged in the pursuit of each criminal. If you cooperate with the system, then you're less likely to be bagged yourself. But if you are called on to go to jail, it's your duty to 'pay your dues' as it were; that's the cost of freedom.

juju · 11-21-2002, 05:47 PM

You can't possibly be serious. Are you joking?

wolf · 11-21-2002, 05:50 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by slang
I have been unable to provide credible evidence that that may happen but if it does, I'm not sharing my long term storage MREs and disaster survival gear with anyone carrying a Democratic voting card (unless she's got ammo).

And i always do ...

(i guess you could say i'm a D.I.N.O.)

juju · 11-21-2002, 06:10 PM

Check out this list of things the Information Awareness Office says they'd like to implement.

<ul style="margin-top: 0in; margin-bottom: 0in" type="disc"> <li class="MsoNormal">Collaboration and sharing over TCP/IP networks across agency boundaries</li><li class="MsoNormal">Large, distributed repositories with dynamic schemas that can be changed interactively by users</li><li class="MsoNormal">Foreign language machine translation and speech recognition</li><li class="MsoNormal">Biometric signatures of humans</li><li class="MsoNormal">Real time learning, pattern matching and anomalous pattern detection</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Entity extraction from natural language text</li><li class="MsoNormal">Human network analysis and behavior model building engines</li><li class="MsoNormal">Event prediction and capability development model building engines</li><li class="MsoNormal">Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Business rules sub-systems for access control and process management</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Other aids for human cognition and human reasoning</li> </ul>

Some of these sound pretty far-fetched to me. What exactly is a biological algorithm? Are they really going to try to perfect speech recognition and natural language translation?

wolf · 11-21-2002, 06:35 PM

Many, many years ago (approx 1983) I attended a lecture that was given by one of the developers of AI (I think it was Weisman or Weisbrod or something like that ... but I'm getting old and my memory is failing ...)

Anyway, instead of a lecture on the latest in AI, we were treated to a two hour treatise on the coming dangers of the information age ... THIS is the stuff he was talking about ...

It's more than scary to see this kind of thing coming to pass ... and i keep worrying that this will go the rest of the way, to a cashless society so NOTHING is off the database.

Now, as it happens, I'm you're basic, law-abiding citizen, however, i do still wonder if some mail order purchases and magazine subscriptions made in my impetuous youth will someday come back to haunt me ... in the form of the BATF, FBI, and AEC showing up at the door to discuss my reading habits.

The problem of the database lies not solely in its existence but in its ability to red flag certain clusters of behavior. Think of the PK Dick story, and recent movie, "Minority Report". Our system of justice is REacvtive, not PROactive.

hermit22 · 11-21-2002, 07:28 PM

I don't think you can be proactive in a free society.

Nic Name · 11-21-2002, 07:36 PM

The danger may not be in the government finding out what we've already read. Our children might grow up thinking that there a books that are just not a good idea to read ... nothing good can come of reading this or that ... and "people should watch what they say" following the advice ofAri Fleischer.

"Never use your real name on the Internet" will be understood as a necessary first step to protecting ourselves from having the government know what we're thinking, rather than protecting our children from the risk meeting "evil doers" online.

Don't talk politics on the telephone. Never question the government's actions. It's just not worth the risk.

Sure, we can all buy our books using aliases and get credit cards in our pets' names. No big deal.

I'm sure that our children will figure out how to live their lives away from the prying eyes of the government.

slang · 11-21-2002, 07:44 PM

Bitman

Would you point me to some background on the thought that the founding fathers were in favor of convicting 1000 innocent men rather than let one guilty man go free?

That wasn't how I remember that thought being written but I can rarely find the background or quotes that I look for.

The phrase I see with a basic Google search says " better for 100 guilty men to go free than one man be unjustly convicted ". There are many places this is quoted but I cant find the source from the founding fathers.

If your quote is correct , I have another reading assignment as well as another re-evaluation of my opinion.

11-21-2002, 01:18 AM	#16
Cairo Coronation Incarnate Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: U.S.A. Posts: 91	Hi Nic Name, Does it bother me that for years now, any individual layperson who cares to can access any public information on me if they want to? Not really. Does it bother me that our Agencies are forbidden to do what I, and everybody and their mother....even Agents themselves off duty can do? Yes, because terrorists use this bureaucratic nonsense to kill us. The private information on me STILL needs a Judges court order to access. __________________ ______________________________ The biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the World that he didn't exist. Keyser Soze

11-21-2002, 01:45 AM	#17
Nic Name retired Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Toronto, Canada Posts: 1,930	Cairo, I think we are discussing two distinct situations. Poindexter is developing for the DOD a system for scanning aggregated data to flag patterns of behavior and then identify individuals who would be persons of interest. You are suggesting that there are judicial safeguards for the surveillance of individuals, similar to seeking a search warrant or wire tap. Of course, you understand that Poindexter's system of surveillance is not going to require judicial authority to run patterns of suspicious activities against the database to determine "persons of interest" and that no judicial order need be sought to keep an eye on such persons by following, enquiring of neighbors and employers, etc. If wiretapping or other invasion of privacy is deemed desirable by the Agency, the judges who will authorize such will be nameless faceless judges of a secret court, who will not hear any submissions except from the Attorney General, if current practises are any indication. If a person is arrested he may be held without legal representation or charge at the discretion of the Commander in Chief, as in the case of Padilla. (Is he still alive? Does anyone know or care?) I'm feeling better already. Last edited by Nic Name; 11-21-2002 at 01:48 AM.

11-21-2002, 01:48 AM	#18
juju no one of consequence Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Arkansas Posts: 2,839	Hey Cairo, your posts are formatted very strangely. Is this intentional? How about some nice, neat paragraphs? Last edited by juju; 11-21-2002 at 02:16 AM.

11-21-2002, 08:01 AM	#21
jaguar whig Join Date: Apr 2001 Posts: 5,075	Hermit could you post the paper, or the part on netwar? The concept interests me. __________________ Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. - Twain

11-21-2002, 11:43 AM	#22
hermit22 sleep. Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: So Cal. Posts: 257	There's an entire RAND book about it, and that's probably the best source. http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1382/ Pay special attention to Chapters 1 and 10. Netwar is especially interesting if you know a bit about computers and networks. The basic idea is that the networked structure exists on the organizational, doctrinal and tactical levels in the most successful modern terrorist organizations. al-Qaeda, for example, is both a "hub and spoke" arrangement, with the cells communicating directly with one central command and a "wheel" arrangement, wherein they can communicate with any other cell in the network directly. Interesting stuff. __________________ blippety blah bluh blah blah Last edited by hermit22; 11-21-2002 at 01:19 PM.

11-21-2002, 05:27 PM	#23
Bitman cellar smellar Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: californy, baby! Posts: 403	You people seem to be missing the big picture -- Our government's purpose is to prevent all crime before it happens. As the Foundering Fathers said, "better 1000 innocent men go to jail than one guilty man be freed." (I believe they said something else, but that's what they meant, hence the 'foundering'.) They didn't have the ability to do this back then, but today our computers are fast enough and large enough to track the info needed to prevent crime. And over time, the database will improve, and fewer innocents will be bagged in the pursuit of each criminal. If you cooperate with the system, then you're less likely to be bagged yourself. But if you are called on to go to jail, it's your duty to 'pay your dues' as it were; that's the cost of freedom.

11-21-2002, 05:47 PM	#24
juju no one of consequence Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Arkansas Posts: 2,839	You can't possibly be serious. Are you joking?

11-21-2002, 06:10 PM	#26
juju no one of consequence Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Arkansas Posts: 2,839	Check out this list of things the Information Awareness Office says they'd like to implement. <ul style="margin-top: 0in; margin-bottom: 0in" type="disc"> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Collaboration and sharing over TCP/IP networks across agency boundaries</span></li><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Large, distributed repositories with dynamic schemas that can be changed interactively by users</span></li><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Foreign language machine translation and speech recognition</span></li><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Biometric signatures of humans</span></li><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Real time learning, pattern matching and anomalous pattern detection</span></li> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Entity extraction from natural language text</span></li><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Human network analysis and behavior model building engines</span></li><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Event prediction and capability development model building engines</span></li><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning</span></li> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance</span></li> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Business rules sub-systems for access control and process management</span></li> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control</span></li> <li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Other aids for human cognition and human reasoning</span></li> </ul> Some of these sound pretty far-fetched to me. What exactly is a biological algorithm? Are they really going to try to perfect speech recognition and natural language translation?

11-21-2002, 06:35 PM	#27
wolf lobber of scimitars Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Phila Burbs Posts: 20,774	Many, many years ago (approx 1983) I attended a lecture that was given by one of the developers of AI (I think it was Weisman or Weisbrod or something like that ... but I'm getting old and my memory is failing ...) Anyway, instead of a lecture on the latest in AI, we were treated to a two hour treatise on the coming dangers of the information age ... THIS is the stuff he was talking about ... It's more than scary to see this kind of thing coming to pass ... and i keep worrying that this will go the rest of the way, to a cashless society so NOTHING is off the database. Now, as it happens, I'm you're basic, law-abiding citizen, however, i do still wonder if some mail order purchases and magazine subscriptions made in my impetuous youth will someday come back to haunt me ... in the form of the BATF, FBI, and AEC showing up at the door to discuss my reading habits. The problem of the database lies not solely in its existence but in its ability to red flag certain clusters of behavior. Think of the PK Dick story, and recent movie, "Minority Report". Our system of justice is REacvtive, not PROactive. __________________ wolf eht htiw og "Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception." --G. Edward Griffin The Creature from Jekyll Island High Priestess of the Church of the Whale Penis Last edited by wolf; 11-21-2002 at 06:48 PM.

11-21-2002, 07:28 PM	#28
hermit22 sleep. Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: So Cal. Posts: 257	I don't think you can be proactive in a free society. __________________ blippety blah bluh blah blah

11-21-2002, 07:36 PM	#29
Nic Name retired Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Toronto, Canada Posts: 1,930	The danger may not be in the government finding out what we've already read. Our children might grow up thinking that there a books that are just not a good idea to read ... nothing good can come of reading this or that ... and "people should watch what they say" following the advice ofAri Fleischer. "Never use your real name on the Internet" will be understood as a necessary first step to protecting ourselves from having the government know what we're thinking, rather than protecting our children from the risk meeting "evil doers" online. Don't talk politics on the telephone. Never question the government's actions. It's just not worth the risk. Sure, we can all buy our books using aliases and get credit cards in our pets' names. No big deal. I'm sure that our children will figure out how to live their lives away from the prying eyes of the government.

11-21-2002, 07:44 PM	#30
slang St Petersburg, Florida Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 3,423	Bitman Would you point me to some background on the thought that the founding fathers were in favor of convicting 1000 innocent men rather than let one guilty man go free? That wasn't how I remember that thought being written but I can rarely find the background or quotes that I look for. The phrase I see with a basic Google search says " better for 100 guilty men to go free than one man be unjustly convicted ". There are many places this is quoted but I cant find the source from the founding fathers. If your quote is correct , I have another reading assignment as well as another re-evaluation of my opinion.

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