US plans massive Internet data-mining

February 9th, 2006 at 20:02 Björn Hallberg

Slashdot notes that the US government is about to launch an unprecedented barrage against the Internet and would-be “terrorists.” The data-mining AI, dubbed ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement), aims to spider the entire accessible web at the very least and offer predictions on whether users are to be deemed naughty or nice. Most likely this also ties in to the search engines and free email services that the US government has been able to strong-arm.

Like the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, ADVISE “looks very much like TIA.” And like the Total Information Awareness program, ADVISE contains no privacy protection whatsoever. One could say that the US is about to become the biggest troll of them all.

Aside from potentially invading the privacy of people there are a long series of problems one has to consider. First, it is a given that this is mostly smoke and mirrors of course. It will not provide any information that couldn’t have been found out the old-fashioned way. In fact, even with the massive resources at their disposal, ADVISE will most likely provide more data than anyone can sift through. And anyone who thinks that AI can make such decisions has been watching too much sci-fi. The claims that similar technologies have worked in the past are either bogus or flukes.
Second, one would have to secure such a database from 3rd parties such as corporate interests. It must not become a basis for the RIAA to launch its next wave of law suits. Seeing as the government has its hands in the corporate lobby cookie jar, this is indeed a troubling prospect. Pledging that there will be a fairly high legal threshold before information is drawn from the database hardly convinces me. Not when “terrorism” is so loosely defined and when there are so many people eager to dig into this information.
Third, all of this presumes that you’re either looking for technologically very inept people or that they are unaware of surveillance. None of these premisses make any sense. Information can easily be obfuscated or encrypted and for spidering to even work one would need an entry point to a document or discussion board. And not password protected. One would also have to assume that these “terrorists” know that they are being watched. Especially after this information coming out. Most of the alleged “terrorists” were trained by the CIA after all so they should have a clue.

At best this is a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money aimed to convince the public that the government is on top of things. But far more likely, this will produce rationales for stifling dissent on the Internet, and shut down sites that are critical of the tyrants and the new world order. The very knowledge that big brother is watching and deriving may even go a long way towards self-censorship.

The Slashdot description however manages to perhaps unwittingly capture the US mentality.

Unlike traditional dataveilance like Echelon, ADVISE aims to find terrorists before they strike and even deduce their motivations in wanting to commit their crimes.

Right, because their motivations are so hard to figure out you need several linked supercomputers chewing away at an image of thousands of gigabytes of data. Priceless. If we for a moment assume that “terrorism” isn’t in fact handled from Langley, Virginia … my advise would be to look in the mirror America!

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