Spying on the American public(perceived threat)has been ongoing.

Mayhaps the FISA subpoenas aren’t just about post 9/11 behaviors, and an unravelling of domestic programs would inevitably follow their public disrobing.

J. Edgar Hoover lives.

They’ve been buying snake oil from SAIC and TRW and MITRE and BBN and Booz-Allen forever. You can chalk a certain amount of the need for â€open spigot†collection to the fact that *none* of the filtering and selection systems actually does the intended job.

The datamining and fusion efforts are predicated on a false assumption, namely that there has to be a silver bullet in there somewhere. The contractors are only too happy to comply with the desire, even though it’s chimerical. But as today’s CIA report says, there was no pre-9/11 silver bullet. There weren’t WMDs in Iraq, either, no matter how hard they looked.

Of interest, one might note that Gonzo now owns the Talon Guardian database and all its influx.

Given the White House and Gonzo’s past record of politicizing any and all aspects of the DOJ with Repug favoritism, if not outright RNC control, wanna bet that the database is being run on Repug servers?

And of course, since the RNC is part of the Executive branch, Executive Privilege applys, doncha know?

I’ll help you decide. It’s worse that they have the db in the first place. If they didn’t have it, it wouldn’t be a concern whether or not they could make it work. Since they do have it, I’m acutally slightly comforted to hear that they can’t just click and drag your SSN from one table to the next and pull up every financial transaction you’ve ever made and cross-reference that with every freeway exit you’ve ever taken and bed you’ve ever slept in. Becuase if they really could have efficient links, that’s how much information the American intelligence community has about every American citizen.

There must be an absolute goldmine of blackmail information in there, covering every indiscretion of all of the members of Congress and all of the mouthpieces of traditional media… but is it actually being used? And if so, by whom?

tekel — I was listening to NPR this evening and there was a story on All Things Considered about a German sociologist who has been arrested because his academic writing contained the words â€gentrification†and â€inequalityâ€, which set off alarm bells with German intelligence officials who claim that the fact a known terrorist organization in Germany also uses those words cannot be a coincidence. Perhaps this man is indeed linked to the terrorists, but from the way the story was reported, the German data miners sound like paranoid imbeciles. In any event, if German professors are the subjects of data mining, it seems more than likely that Americans are as well.

And while I have my tinfoil hat on, when I pick up my car from Central Parking at Logan airport, the machine where I pay my ticket prints out the location of my car for me. While I’ll concede that the absent minded might find that very handy, it seriously creeps me out.

Sadly, since this is the Bush admin., I am reluctant to say anything via this blog which might help them out with their dbs. Sigh.

A local topics (where to get your car fixed, school board meeting, etc.) bulletin board I read published a method of disabling RFID chips just last week (basically, drill a hole in the dang things). It might be a sensible, if crude, approach.

Sea Story Time:
In the early 70’s I was in the Coast Guard and we had our local (LA/Long Beach Harbor) â€clients†(known shipping companies and ships) in a data base of a sort: paper records for local use and a mainframe at the USCG, somewhere, probably in Connecticut or Alameda or New York. The idea was to maintain a record of inspections and violations, pretty much what you’d expect from the sea-cops. We had the same thing up in Alaska with the Fed Fisheries guy, he had most of the Russian and Japanese factory ships in his head, backed up by paper records, backed up by a rudimentary DB on a mainframe somewhere.

In the eighties I worked as a contractor with the USCG and some other organizations using the DDN to intercommunicate between agencies down in the Caribbean, and they were all using their own DB systems of known good guys and bad guys, now on mini computers (VAX’s and the like) and mainframes, with terminal access to the field. (And they had two problems that were crippling enforcement activities in the area: communications frequencies and protocols between agencies; and what PJ describes at the top of this thread, the inability to read each other’s data without ’converting’ the fields into a common format and enabling the local DB to read the re-formatted data. It was a mess.)

I hear now it’s all on the laptop on the cutter, backed up and updated via secure wireless links, but the details remain the same: bad guys, good guys, details on each.
I guess I see this as the only way one could run a law enforcement/security organization.
The problem is when the enforcement group goes past the thin line separating legit information gathering (and sharing) and the violation of individual civil rights. Which is where we are now, it would appear.

Bill E. wrote on Aug. 21st:

â€They’ve been buying snake oil from SAIC and TRW and MITRE and BBN and Booz-Allen forever. You can chalk a certain amount of the need for â€open spigot†collection to the fact that *none* of the filtering and selection systems actually does the intended job.

The datamining and fusion efforts are predicated on a false assumption, namely that there has to be a silver bullet in there somewhere. The contractors are only too happy to comply with the desire, even though it’s chimerical. But as today’s CIA report says, there was no pre-9/11 silver bullet. There weren’t WMDs in Iraq, either, no matter how hard they looked.â€

Thanks for mentioning these contractors, it provides good context, and I’d agree about why these systems frequently don’t work–it’s just more pork-barrel spending, a bipartisan addiction. I found a SAIC-operative in the phone recs. of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, one Ronald Roughead.

You all might want to consider that the woman who was former World Bank president–Paul Wolfowitz–was also an employee of SAIC. They are all playing a very dangerous game, probably utilizing a â€Salon Kitty†approach. Many of these people have intel-backgrounds and high-level security clearances. SAIC is connected to the Randy â€Duke†Cunningham scandal as well with Jack Abramoff, at this point a sidebar.

Who is Shaha Ali Riza? I’d say she’s working for SAIC, MI6, and several other intelligence agencies of other nations, probably even at least one Middle Eastern one. Maybe the Saudis?