- Why is the United States government spending millions
of dollars to track down critics of George W. Bush in the press? And why
have major American universities agreed to put this technology of tyranny
into the state's hands?
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- At the most basic level, of course,
both questions are easily answered: 1) Power. 2) Money. The Bush administration
wants to be able to root out - and counteract - any dissenting noises that
might put a crimp in its ongoing crusade for "full spectrum dominance"
of global affairs, while the august institutions of higher learning involved
- the universities of Cornell, Pittsburgh and Utah - crave the federal
green that keeps them in clover.
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- But beyond these grubby realities,
there are many other disturbing aspects of this new program - which is
itself only part of a much broader penetration of American academia by
the Department of Homeland Security.
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- As with so many of the Bush measures
that have quietly stripped away America's liberties, this one too is beginning
with a whimper, not a bang: a modest $2.4 Department of Homeland Security
million grant to develop "sentiment analysis" software that will
allow the government's "security organs" to sift millions of
articles for "negative opinions of the United States or its leaders
in newspapers and other publications overseas," as the New York Times
reported earlier this month. Such negative opinions must be caught and
catalogued because they could pose "potential threats to the nation,"
security apparatchiks told the Times.
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- This hydra-headed snooping program
is based on "information extraction," which, as a chipper PR
piece from Cornell tells us, is a process by which "computers scan
text to find meaning in natural language," rather than the rigid literalism
ordinarily demanded by silicon cogitators. Under the gentle tutelage of
Homeland Security, the universities "will use machine-learning algorithms
to give computers examples of text expressing both fact and opinion and
teach them to tell the difference," says the Cornell blurb.
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- At this point, the ancient and
ever-pertinent question of Pontius Pilate comes to mind: "What is
truth?" Of course, Pilate, being a devotee of what George W. Bush
likes to call "the path of action," gave the answer to his philosophical
inquiry in brute physical form: truth is whatever the empire says it is
- so take this Galilean rabble-rouser out and crucify him already. In like
manner, it will certainly be the government "security organs"
who ultimately determine the criteria for what is fact and what is opinion
- and whether the latter is positive or negative, perhaps even a candidate
for the Bush-Pilate "path."
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- The academics will be trying
out the Sentiment Analysis program (let's call it SAP, for short) on four
main clusters of articles from 2001-2002, the Times reports. These include:
Bush's famous declaration of an "axis of evil" threatening the
world; the treatment of his Terror War captives in Guantanamo Bay; global
warming; and the failed Bush-backed bid to topple Venezuela's Hugo Chavez
in a coup - all of them issues on which the Bush administration was at
odds with much of the world, and large swathes of American opinion as well.
Obviously, such issues are fertile fields for terrorist thought-crimes
to be snagged and tagged by SAP.
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- For those with concerns about
civil liberties, Cornell assures us that SAP will be limited strictly to
foreign publications. Oh, really? Hands up out there, everyone who believes
that this technology will not be used to ferret out "potential threats
to the nation" arising in the Homeland press as well. After all, the
Unitary Executive Decider-in-Chief has already decided that the nation's
iron-clad laws against warrantless surveillance of American citizens can
be swept aside by his "inherent powers" if he decides it's necessary.
Why should he bother with any petty restrictions on a press-monitoring
program? And wouldn't dissension within the ranks of the volk itself actually
be more threatening to government policy than the grumbling of malcontents
overseas?
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- II.
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- Then again, what is so sinister
about the plan, exactly? Surely every government is eager to read its notices
in the press, foreign and domestic. Surely the Bush administration already
has a myriad of minions in the White House, the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and
embassies around the world doing just that. True enough - and there's the
rub. For if they are already tracking and sifting media sentiment to a
fare-thee-well, why do they need SAP's $2.4 million software?
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- Here we see the same principle
that lies behind Bush's illegal warrantless surveillance program. Long-established
law - the FISA court - already provides Bush with the power to spy on anyone
even remotely suspected of a connection to terrorism - and to do so immediately,
without waiting a single instant or jumping through a single bureaucratic
hoop to get the operation going. So who is he actually using his warrantless
surveillance program against? It can't be suspected terrorists; they are
already covered by existing law. There are only two conclusions to be drawn
from this strange state of affairs: 1) The Bush regime is using the program
to spy on people other than suspected terrorists. 2) It is using the program
to establish the principle that presidential power cannot be restrained
by law in any area that the president arbitrarily designates a "matter
of national security." These conclusions are not mutually exclusive,
of course.
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- Likewise, we must ask: who is
the "Sentiment Analysis" program aimed at? It can't be the major
news and opinion drivers in the international and national media; these
are already being monitored. And it hardly requires a deus ex machina to
determine the political sentiment behind news stories and opinion pieces.
Why then would you need multimillion-dollar computer whizbangery to tell
you whether a story casts a favorable or critical light on Bush and his
policies? And how could critical "sentiment" in the kinds of
stories that Cornell, Pitt and Utah are examining in their tests pose any
kind of "potential threat" to the nation? Again, there must be
something else behind the program because, as with warrantless surveillance,
it is clearly redundant on its face.
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- The key to this conundrum mostly
likely lies in the envisioned scope of the program: "millions of articles"
to be processed for "sentiment analysis." This denotes a fishing
expedition that goes far beyond the "publicly available material,
primarily news reports and editorials from English-language newspapers
worldwide" that Claire Cardie, Cornell's lead researcher on SAP, says
that her team will be using in developing the software. The target of such
a scope cannot be simply the English-language foreign press, or the foreign
press as a whole, or indeed, every newspaper in the world, from Pyongyang
to Peoria. It must also be aimed at other modes of textual communication,
in print and online.
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- In fact, later in the PR blurb,
Cardie rather gives the game away when, seeking to allay "fears about
invasions of privacy" raised by the research, she notes that "the
techniques would have to be changed considerably to work on documents like
e-mails." Yes; and an intercontinental ballistic missile is just a
big, shiny, harmless rocket - until you load it with a nuclear weapon and
fire it at somebody. No doubt Cardie is simply a dedicated scientist, focused
on the technical problem at hand, and her naivetè on this point
is genuine; but once you have built a platform that can churn through millions
of pieces of text to uncover criticism and dissent - however the organs
deign to define these concepts - then this technology can certainly be
adapted to launch all-encompassing "sentiment analysis" against
any form of written communication you please.
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- Nor is this program being developed
in isolation. It is part of a larger Homeland Security push "to conduct
research on advanced methods for information analysis and to develop computational
technologies that contribute to securing the homeland," as a DHS press
release puts it, in announcing the formation of yet another university
consortium. This group - led by Rutgers, and including the University of
Southern California, the University of Illinois and, once again, Pitt -
has pulled down a whopping $10.2 million to "identify common patterns
from numerous sources of information" that "may be indicative
of" - what else? - "potential threats to the nation."
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- This research program will draw
on such areas as "knowledge representation, uncertainty quantification,
high-performance computing architectures" - and our old friends, information
extraction and natural language processing. It is in fact closely associated
with the "sentiment analysis" work being done by the Cornell
group - and note that the Rutgers consortium is designing its info-gobbling
software to deal with "numerous sources" of information. Do we
sense some synergy going on here?
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- III.
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- The Cornell and Rutgers groups
are two of four "University Affiliate Centers" thus far established
by Homeland Security. All of the consortiums are geared toward the amassing,
storing and analysis of unimaginably vast amounts of information, gathered
relentlessly from a multitude of sources and formats. They are in turn
just part of a still-larger panorama of "data mining" programs
being developed - or already in use - by the security organs.
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- These include the "Analysis,
Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement" (ADVISE)
program, which can rip and read mountains of open source data - such as
web sites and databases, as analyst Michael Hampton reports. Two Democratic
Congressmen, David Obey of Wisconsin and Martin Slabo of Minnesota, have
asked the General Accounting Office to investigate the program for possible
intrusions on privacy rights, Hampton notes.
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- While Congressional concern for
privacy is all well and good, we know that it means nothing to the Unitary
Executive. Earlier this month, Bush used his "signing statement"
magic wand to wave away a direct Congressional mandate for reports on whether
Homeland Security is obeying privacy laws in compiling its secret "watch
lists," which increasingly control more and more aspects of American
life, including "who gets on planes, who gets government jobs, who
gets employed," as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center, told AP. Using the by-now ritualistic language
of presidential dictatorship, Bush's statement said he would ignore Congress's
direct order and delay, alter or simply quash the privacy reports as he
saw fit.
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- You don't need a machine-learning
algorithm or $2.4 million worth of Ivy League software to connect the dots
here. The Bush administration already has spyware devouring reams of private
information in every direction. It is now paying top universities millions
of dollars to refine this data into actionable intelligence - including
the automated discernment and tracking of dissent against administration
policies and criticism of the president. Bush has openly declared that
he has no intention of obeying privacy laws - or any other laws safeguarding
the Constitutional rights of American citizens - if he doesn't want to.
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- And if that's not sinister enough
for you, consider this: on Tuesday George W. Bush signed the "Military
Commissions Act," which states that he can arbitrarily declare anyone
- yes, American citizens included - an "unlawful enemy combatant"
for any action that he arbitrarily decides constitutes "material support"
to terrorists. He can imprison these "UECs" without charge or
trial, for the duration of the "War on Terror," which he and
Dick Cheney have already assured us will not end "in our lifetime."
He can subject these captives to "strenuous interrogation techniques"
that by any sane reckoning constitute torture - but this same Act allows
Bush himself to determine what is legally torture and what is not, except
in the most extreme cases, such as rape and deliberate murder.
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- A regime openly committed to
wielding arbitrary power over the life and liberty of every person on earth
is now equipping itself with intrusive technology beyond the wildest dreams
of the most totalitarian states in history. And some of the nation's most
respected educational institutions - proud bastions of civilization and
enlightenment - are helping them do it. It is simply impossible that such
a system will not be mightily abused.
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- And for all you SAP machines
out there: that conclusion is a fact, not an opinion.
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- Chris Floyd is an American journalist.
His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world,
including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian
Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is
the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush
Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque"
political blog. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.
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