Will The CIA Use Twitter, Google And Facebook Against Us? Scientists Need To Listen To More Neil Young

Done in by a satellite phone

I admit that I felt a tinge of embarrassment Saturday comparing the weak tea passing as coverage of the end of Qaddafi in our newspaper of record and what the Brits found in The Guardian. Can't we do anything right anymore? In answer, specifically regarding the New York Times, an old friend sent me a scant-remarked upon article in that paper from a week or so ago, Government Aims to Build a 'Data Eye in the Sky', something at least as important as how brutally Qadaffi suffered before being put out of his misery with a bullet to the brain (and the dick).

The Times reported that "social scientists"-- just conger up who pays these "social scientists"-- "are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet-- Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones" to predict the future.

The most optimistic researchers believe that these storehouses of “big data” will for the first time reveal sociological laws of human behavior-- enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability, just as physicists and chemists can predict natural phenomena.

...The government is showing interest in the idea. This summer a little-known intelligence agency began seeking ideas from academic social scientists and corporations for ways to automatically scan the Internet in 21 Latin American countries for “big data,” according to a research proposal being circulated by the agency. The three-year experiment, to begin in April, is being financed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa (pronounced eye-AR-puh), part of the office of the director of national intelligence.

The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption and movement of populations. It will use publicly accessible data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic webcams and changes in Wikipedia entries.

It is intended to be an entirely automated system, a “data eye in the sky” without human intervention, according to the program proposal. The research would not be limited to political and economic events, but would also explore the ability to predict pandemics and other types of widespread contagion, something that has been pursued independently by civilian researchers and by companies like Google.

Some social scientists and advocates of privacy rights are deeply skeptical of the project, saying it evokes queasy memories of Total Information Awareness, a post-9/11 Pentagon program that proposed hunting for potential attackers by identifying patterns in vast collections of public and private data: telephone calling records, e-mail, travel data, visa and passport information, and credit card transactions.

“I have Total Information Awareness flashbacks when things like this happen,” said David Price, an anthropologist at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash., who has written about cooperation between social scientists and intelligence agencies. “On the one hand it’s understandable for a nation-state to want to track things like the outbreak of a pandemic, but I have to wonder about the total automation of this and what productive will come of it.”

Iarpa officials declined to discuss the research program, saying they are prohibited from giving interviews until contract awards are made later this year.

A similar project by their military sister organization, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, aims to automatically identify insurgent social networks in Afghanistan.

In its most recent budget proposal, the defense agency argues that its analysis can expose terrorist cells and other stateless groups by tracking their meetings, rehearsals and sharing of material and money transfers.

So far there have been only scattered examples of the potential of mining social media. Last year HP Labs researchers used Twitter data to accurately predict box office revenues of Hollywood movies. In August, the National Science Foundation approved funds for research in using social media like Twitter and Facebook to assess earthquake damage in real time.

...Some scientists are skeptical. They cite the Pentagon’s ill-fated Project Camelot in the 1960s, which also explored the possibility that social science could predict political and economic events, but was canceled in the face of widespread criticism by scholars.

The project focused on Chile, with the goal of developing methods for anticipating “violent changes” and offering ways of averting possible rebellions. It led to an uproar among social scientists, who argued that the study would compromise their professional ethics.

In recent years, however, academic opposition to military financing of research has faded... But advocates of privacy rights worry that public data and the related techniques developed in the new Iarpa project will be adapted for clandestine “total information” operations.

“These techniques are double-edged,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group based in Washington. “They can be used as easily against political opponents in the United States as they can against threats from foreign countries.” ... [T]he ease of acquiring and manipulating huge data sets charting Internet behavior causes many researchers to warn that the data mining technologies may be quickly outrunning the ability of scientists to think through questions of privacy and ethics.

This used to be called integrity. That's been obliterated and corrupted by money and other forms of lust. In the music business. what credible artist would have ever seriously considered lending his or her music to a commercial? Today there are virtually no artists that don't. The Neil Young video for "This Note's For You" (rare in its unedited state, below) was actually totally banned by MTV before popular pressure forced them to start running it. Much to the chagrin of many MTV executives, it won MTV's 1989 Best Video of the Year on their award show.