[Air-l] back to 1984

Andrew J Perrin andrew_perrin at unc.edu
Thu Oct 5 07:04:21 PDT 2006


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
>
>
> --
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> // Alexander C. Halavais
> // Social Architect
> // http://alex.halavais.net
> //
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