Politics: Screwing You Better Through Science
The United States government has managed to find a way around all the wise legislation directing the government to stand down its privacy-invading data-mining work. This comes as no surprise, though it is fairly vile. And because no story is complete without it, the Bush administration undertook this end-around our privacy and simultaneously laid down with questionable bedfellows. The Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department are each dropping a couple million on the state of Florida, which has worked with a suspected drug smuggler (!) to come up with a TIA-type database containing millions of records on personal information and commercial transactions of innocent Americans (surprise).
Far from the government having to conduct open bidding and development on such a product, this was given to the government of Florida as a gift, which now threatens the privacy of all of us. Apparently a Boca Raton-based company developed the software out of the goodness of its heart, and then "donated" it to the Florida government, which in turn got $8 million from the Department of Homeland Security and $4 million from the Justice Department to spread it around the country. Oddly, the "donation" by Seisint, Inc is now being paid for (the article says the first $1.6 million has been allocated by Florida), which makes it something other than a donation.
Most harrowing: the system (annoyingly called the "Matrix" by some asshole who should get sued blind by the Wachowsky brothers, even though they're assholes, too) will instantly tell law enforcement about, say, all the brown-haired people with red pickup trucks in a twenty-mile radius of a certain event. This is a violation of your privacy already. It's horrifying because people with the misfortune of sporting brown locks and driving red pickup trucks may fall into the hands of a government that has no qualms about locking people up indefinitely and never allowing them to, I don't know, exercise their Sixth Amendment right to "a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury" or "to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence"
The United States government has managed to find a way around all the wise legislation directing the government to stand down its privacy-invading data-mining work. This comes as no surprise, though it is fairly vile. And because no story is complete without it, the Bush administration undertook this end-around our privacy and simultaneously laid down with questionable bedfellows. The Justice Department and the Homeland Security Department are each dropping a couple million on the state of Florida, which has worked with a suspected drug smuggler (!) to come up with a TIA-type database containing millions of records on personal information and commercial transactions of innocent Americans (surprise).
Far from the government having to conduct open bidding and development on such a product, this was given to the government of Florida as a gift, which now threatens the privacy of all of us. Apparently a Boca Raton-based company developed the software out of the goodness of its heart, and then "donated" it to the Florida government, which in turn got $8 million from the Department of Homeland Security and $4 million from the Justice Department to spread it around the country. Oddly, the "donation" by Seisint, Inc is now being paid for (the article says the first $1.6 million has been allocated by Florida), which makes it something other than a donation.
Most harrowing: the system (annoyingly called the "Matrix" by some asshole who should get sued blind by the Wachowsky brothers, even though they're assholes, too) will instantly tell law enforcement about, say, all the brown-haired people with red pickup trucks in a twenty-mile radius of a certain event. This is a violation of your privacy already. It's horrifying because people with the misfortune of sporting brown locks and driving red pickup trucks may fall into the hands of a government that has no qualms about locking people up indefinitely and never allowing them to, I don't know, exercise their Sixth Amendment right to "a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury" or "to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence"
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