Thursday, December 06, 2007
NO WORD UNHEARD?
In an article written for business week online ,Otis Port reports that many Al Qaeda operatives and terrorists have been obtained since September 11th through the use of electronic snooping. This includes the use of cell phone,email, and web upload surveillance techniques, specifically the use of the secret Echelon network . For those of you who don't know Echelon is a global eavesdropping system run by the National Security Agency and its counterparts in places like Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. According to Port these supercomputer systems used at the NSA move through a flood of terrorist related materials. These documents got to human analysts and whatever cant be used is gotten rid of. But according to Port these analysts have one downfall. They are human and can only read through the data so fast. Port writes of this,
"Two Arabic messages collected on Sept. 10, 2001, hinting of a major event the next day, weren't translated until Sept. 12. Now, the intelligence agencies vow to do better, and the FBI says it has already shrunk translation delays to under 12 hours."
The eventual goal of this supercomputer system is to be able to spot terrorist actions and attacks before they happen through the use of data-mining systems that could look through multiple databases and spot terrorist related phrases and warnings about future plans.
In my opinion this is a great tool in the fight on terrorism . The companies involved in this should push ahead in its objectives since the battle on terror will probably never end and a tool such as a supercomputer to detect terrorist activity could be a useful one. Of course improper use of this tool is an issue raises at the end of this article. Of course a tool such as this one is subject to improper use by a government or ruling party , but so is everything else created for the good of society. I guess this is simply a case of trying to see it as the good outweighing the bad. Yes, this will be a tool used to fight terrorism, but it may be subjected to misuse by authorities to violate citizens rights and privacy. I think that the "anonymization" policy adopted by authorities will aid in this. Certain information such as social security numbers will not be translated by this supercomputer unless authorities can prove that the knowledge of this information is absolutely necessary. Will it work, I don't know? We'll, have to wait and see.
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A good post, good link.
Will the public feel secure with systems like this in place monitoring our every communication? Will the government be able to resist the temptation to use this system for political purposes rather than national security?
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Will the public feel secure with systems like this in place monitoring our every communication? Will the government be able to resist the temptation to use this system for political purposes rather than national security?
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