[Air-l] back to 1984

[Andrew J Perrin]

Personally, the question seems to me to go to why this is funded by the US 
government at all, and much more importantly why it's funded by "homeland 
security."

ap

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin at unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
Assistant Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
New Book: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/178592.ctl


On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, Alex Halavais wrote:

> I seem to be missing something here. Of all of the things a government
> could do that would be objectionable, using tools to aggregate and
> help analyze open source intelligence surely cannot be that evil. I
> presume that you don't object to governments reading what others have
> to say about them--this isn't "mind reading," it's "reading." And
> while analysis of texts certainly requires interpretation by the
> researcher, I see no particular reason to believe that making use of
> computer tools to assist in that analysis would necessitate poorer
> interpretation. I seem to recall a discussion at some point that spoke
> in fairly positive terms about nVivo, another tool used in open source
> intelligence.
>
> If you are worried that poorly thought out actions may result from
> good intelligence, that is another issue. It seems that there is a
> significant breakdown in the process of communicating intelligence
> analysis. But I think that comparisons to the Total Information
> Awareness project are extraordinarily counterproductive. I think
> making use published, open material is an important line of defense
> for any nation or police force. It is only a "thought crime" if the
> writers are persecuted for stating it. Otherwise, it's called
> "listening." Indeed, I see no reason they should limit their analysis
> to foreign newspapers.
>
> Sure, I would love it if they would open up their analysis for public
> consumption. But besides the closed nature of the results, is there
> any reason that this should be different from text analysis systems
> being used to help people keep up on the web today. For example:
>
> Google News: http://news.google.com/news
> Google Zeitgeist: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
> Technorati: http://www.technorati.com/pop/news/
> Blogpulse: http://www.blogpulse.com/
> Global Attention Profiles: http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman
> We Feel Fine: http://wefeelfine.org/
>
> Not to mention the dozens of products designed to map texts (e.g,
> http://www.leximancer.com/gallery.html).
>
> I'm not convinced that providing tools for a government to better
> understand public discourse is automatically a bad thing.
>
> Alex
>
>
> --
> //
> // This email is
> // [X] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded.
> // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing.
> //
> // Alexander C. Halavais
> // Social Architect
> // http://alex.halavais.net
> //
> _______________________________________________
> The air-l at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>