Amygdala

Amygdala

As I've said elsewhere, many many many times now, in varying words, since December 20th, in answer to the endless mantra of "but why couldn't they just get FISA warrants?": bottom line: if you're doing a multiplexdata-mining pattern analysis on tens of thousands or more people, shifting by possibly tens of thousands of people per day, or more, you can't get warrants. It's not humanly possible.

Which, as I keep explaining, only makes the threat exponentially larger than most non-tech oriented left/lib/progressives seem to understand, with this antediluvian focus on "wiretaps" and "why can't you get a FISA warrant?" That's a question that was entirely sensible when we all asked it last month. It's long been answered and answered and answered and answered.

It's far greater reason for Congress to get the truth out, and possibly impeach, then simple wire-tapping. It's as if people kept decrying the threat of TNT when we're talking about the fact that the fusion bomb has been invented and put to use.

Background on some of the history and technology behind the ECHELON precursor to this: see Duncan Campbell's 2000 summary of his 1999 report to the EU Parliament. Or a FAS selection of pieces from circa 1999, but going back to 1996. Final EU Echelon report here.

Also: The point I'm trying to emphasize is that datamining is vastly more threatening to our privacy and liberties, by many orders of magnitude, than mere wire-tapping is.

The most alarming part is the total-information data-mining (or so it appears to be; we know very little as yet; but it's the mostly likely thing).

Data-mining, for those unfamiliar with it, simply put, collecting every available bit of information about you, public and that which comes up via investigation of others, accurate or inaccurate, putting it all in a massive file about you updated on a constant real-time basis, and then integrating that into a massive data-matrix that shows all perceived links between you and other people and enterprises, and then analyzes that, and then washes, rinses, and repeats, non-stop.

The second most frightening thing going on here is the revealed colloborative relationships with, apparently, all the major U.S. telecommunications providers, which has involved direct tapping into the "switches" through which all traffic flows (other than completely independent systems, which I won't detail, and only know a little about, anyway). Repeat: all (relatively and simply put) traffic.

Surely I shouldn't have to over-emphasis just how vastly more potentially totalitarian even this is, let alone the Total Information data-mining it's a part of, then mere wire-tapping. Even if they had been slapping on 5,000, or hell, 50,000, new individual taps a day (not that that would be humanly possible, of course), it would be relatively trivial compared to just how massively, wholly, totalitarian these two vastly more important issues are.

Trying to get people to understand this is not an attempt to minimize the issue. It's to point out how completely anyone instead talking just about "wiretaps" is fricking minimizing the issues at stake here.

People have to learn how datamining threatens them

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