Lawmaker Demands DHS Cease Monitoring of Blogs, Social Media
Now this is rich. Here, we have a gigantic defense contractor getting
a rather small (relativity 11 Million is small) contract to spy on ordinary Americans online activities regarding political
topics on sites like Wired, Huffington Post, Drudge, Wikileaks etc etc. My first question after reading this was: if you are going to spy
on us through an operation that focuses on social news media and blogs… why not someone from the NSA or some other agency where it could be hush
hush? Well, according to the DHS director of office operations, Richard Chavez,
General Dynamics possessed: “skilled technicians in surfing the web.”
Wow.
Not only has the Federal government been dumping 50+ billion dollars of
year annually into DHS since 2003, it’s also the third largest cabinet
department we have. You would think, that someone would be capable of “surfing
the web” inside that bureaucratic wet dream, but apparently not so. That
however, doesn’t surprise me. This rag tag assembly of departments is notorious
for waste. Within its first five years of existence it had 15 Billion dollars worth of failed contracts; and that was by 2008! One shutters to think what that
looks like now?
It is said that this program involves the monitoring of
“publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.”
The most telling piece of this article however is the revelation that General
Dynamics will be sifting people’s posts or words “containing anti-American
sentiment and reaction to policy proposals”. I find it jaw dropping that this isn’t
covered across the front page of every newspaper in the country, but privacy isnt in vogue anymore; this is why Facebook is so huge in the first place.
And with General Dynamics focusing in on the big boys (Twitter and Facebook), it appears that if SOPA and the House didn’t
get the internet under the black boots; the Executive Office would do it themselves (through
a sub contractor). I guess it’s only apropos then that the DHS would hire a killing
machine like General Dynamics to do it.
Between Facebook and Twitter being blamed for using users personal info to sell to third partys (or "let" it just happen to be available) or having both social network sites software being used as a
tool for espionage, it’s apparent that the walls are closing in on the Internets
value. That, being mainly the free passage of information but a close second is/was
the freedom of anonymity.
Not to be outdone, Google announced last week it will launch Screenwise, a mining tool built inside their Chrome browser that will track
your every click, your every move on the net – for a handsome price (is the precursor
for the RFID mass implantation or the mark of the beast?). If you choose to take
part, you can receive up to $25 in a year from Amazon.com. I would be willing
to bet there is a waiting list.
I’d sell my soul, my self esteem a dollar at a time. - MJK
