| -Caveat Lector-
http://www.lewrockwell.com/elkins/elkins68.html Data Miners and the State by Jeff Elkins "The new guidelines emphasize that the FBI must not be deprived of using all lawful authorized methods in investigations, consistent with the Constitution." Attorney General John Ashcroft ~
~ Laura Murphy, Director of the ACLU's Washington office Despite the flag-waving and attempts to brandish the Constitution, the new FBI investigative guidelines promulgated by Ashcroft and company represent a gigantic leap forward for those wishing to fully convert the United States into a surveillance society and shred the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In my last column, I discussed COINTELPRO tactics in cyberspace, focusing on infiltration and subversion of online forums and websites. This time, let's examine commercial data mining services and how the FBI can utilize them. This goes far beyond Google and its online cousins. Using the power of modern relational databases, commercial data mining services have evolved simple mailing lists into complex tables of information about nearly every aspect of your life. Where do you shop? What do you buy? How many long-distance phone calls do you make monthly? Are any of them international? Are you a homeowner? Have you moved recently? How often in the past year have you moved? Have you purchased a car? What is the make, model and registration number? What online sites do you visit? What magazines do you subscribe to? The answers to all these questions and more reside in the commercial databases of many companies, and commercial data mining services aggregate them and sell access. That's how that telemarketer reaches you with an offer for mortgage interest reduction, or the local car dealership knows to send you a mailing when your car hits its third anniversary. Now it's how the FBI will build a database containing an uncannily accurate snapshot of your life. However, it's important to realize that the FBI has always had access to these commercial services, the provisio being that said access had to be tied to an ongoing investigation. Additionally, in theory at any rate, the FBI didn't use these services to build new databases. Now, both of those oversight provisions have been tossed in the trash. These new changes lower the bar in that the FBI can create new databases from commercial sources and use data mining to jump-start an investigation – in other words to conduct fishing expeditions. Now FBI field offices can spy on your commercial and political habits with little or no oversight. And despite any promises that unneeded data will be discarded, you can count on federal databases growing like a particularly bad cancer. Historical precedent exists for this cooperation between commercial data processors and a dictatorial state. The book IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black goes into great detail regarding the unholy alliance between Big Blue and Nazi Germany. History may well be repeating itself, with immeasurably more powerful tools from IBM and other commercial entities. In addition to raw data, America's corporations have extremely powerful software to offer the feds. Larry Ellison of Oracle has already offered to build a national identity card structure for the government and other corporations will surely want a piece of this very lucrative pie. Consider IBM's Intelligent Miner for Data: This tool alone could enable the FBI to harvest information from text sources such as customer correspondence, online news services, e-mail and Web pages. It has the ability to extract patterns from text, organize documents by subject, find predominant themes in a collection of documents, and search for relevant documents using powerful and flexible queries. Considerably more powerful than the punch cards IBM supplied to Hitler and implications of its use by the federal government dwarfs some of Orwell's worst imaginings. Mixing literary metaphors, this offer of a brave new world, or at least its beginning, is brought to you courtesy of John Ashcroft's FBI in partnership with some of America's largest corporations, not in 1984, but in 2002 and beyond. It's a world where the state will know everything about you, down to the most minute detail – what you bought and when you bought it, your likes, your dislikes, your political affiliations or lack thereof. Welcome to the future. June 4, 2002 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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