This time it’s with smart phone apps and a request from the Department of Justice that seems harmless enough, or is it? It asks social media to “Please review the information (RFI) that is attached. The FBI is conducting market research to determine the capabilities of the IT industry to provide a social media application. The tool at a minimum should be able to meet the operational and analytical needs described in the attachment.” Market research for the FBI and DOJ, really?
Those requests include, “ . . . Using capability requirements attached, as a ‘white paper’ guide for developing solution(s). Demos may be provided on a limited basis. This RFI will be updated to reflect potential opportunities to provide demos, if they are deemed necessary.” Hmmm, what kind of demos could those be? It goes on . . .
“Finally, please note that this is not a request for proposals [just capabilities] and no submissions will be accepted as offers for award.” So you’ll be offering concepts for social network spying on your dime. “All submitted solutions should include price estimates for the respective solution(s) which will be reviewed and used for market research and planning purposes.” Planning for what? Ah, you know.
“All questions are due on January 27th. All responses will be considered and issued as an attachment to this RFI for clarification. The responses will be provided by February 1st. All responses to this RFI are now due February 10th.” Sounds like George Orwell wrote it.
Among the goodies of the gee-goggling on social media, we will find “likely developments in the situation of future actions taken by bad actors” and “pattern-life-matrices to support law enforcement planning,” reports Fierce Government.Go figure that one out. Who’s planning to do naughty things and blabbing about it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or whomever, Native Americans sending smoke signals from mesa to mesa?
“Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations.” Thus spoke the “bureau’s Strategic Information and Operations Center . . . in a Jan. 19 request information posted to FedBizOpps.
Now you may actually believe that they are just referring to social media, including that which has gained prominence in academic writing. In fact, FG points out “that an analysis published by the Rand Corp. of tweets using the #IranElection hashtag during 2009 and early 2010 found a correlation between appearance of swear words and protests. The study also found a shift that indicated the protest movement was losing momentum when swearing shifted from curses at the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to curses at an opposition figure.” It’s anybody’s guess, isn’t it?
But this takes the cake: “A March 2011 paper published in the Journal of Computational Science (abstract) also posited that movements of the Dow Jones Average could be predicted to an accuracy of 86.7 percent by changes of national mood reflected in Tweets.” You didn’t know your little tweets could affect the stock market. Well, according to The Economist, British hedge fund Derwent Capital Markets has licensed the algorithm to guide the investments of a $41 million fund. No wonder Britain’s economy is sinking faster than the Titanic.
Now if the naïf you are thinks this all stops with social media, the Washington Post, reports, “FDA staffers sue agency over surveillance of personal email.” Now, we’re not talking about Suzie and boyfriend hashing over the days’ events. Here’s how the story goes . . .
“ . . . The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.
“The surveillance—detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington last week—took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.
“The startup screen on FDA computers warns employees, ‘you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, including any communication accessed or sent from the machine. This specific message has appeared since at least December 2010. Read . . . documents compiled as part of the lawsuit against the FDA for monitoring personal communications on work computers.
“Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes . . .
“Copies of the e-mails show that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers.”
Imagine the chutzpah of the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, specifically designed to monitor the safety and quality and side effects of drugs and food, actually trying to deny the conclusions and opinions of their own doctors and scientists concerns over certain drugs and/or food products. It’s nuts!
Rightfully, the doctors and scientists say “the government violated their constitutional privacy rights by gazing into personal e-mail accounts for the purpose of monitoring activity that they say was lawful.” I mean we are not only headed towards 1984. It seems we have entered it decades ago, both literally and figuratively. What’s next? Kindergarten drawings, term papers, doctoral theses, operation manuals, appliance warrantees, scripture, advertising copy, subway posters, bumper stickers?
And finally, I got a notice today from my favorite search engine that “We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read.” Gee, I wonder what they could be? That list that scrolls down every source I’ve Googled in the last couple of days or weeks as I do research for my writing? I was wondering about that.
But Google continues, trying to be informal, “this stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at http://www.google.com/polices. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012.” The subtext is to take them or do your research somewhere else.
But what I called ‘listing all the sources I used for research recently,” they call their third helpful addition—and for these reasons. “When you post or create a document online, you often want others to see and contribute. By remembering the contact information of the people you want to share with, we make it easy for you to share in any Google product or service with minimal clicks and errors.”
Fellas, thanks, but I’m a big boy and don’t need a big brother. I can deal with the time or energy it takes to re-Google an info source I used again and again for more info. What I can’t deal with is having all these sources staring at me in a bold-faced long list so that anyone else can read my screen at liberty and what I’m working on.
None of this is really a joke. We need privacy to live good, sane lives much more than we need to be spied upon by what’s turned into an industry of government spies. What’s next? Do we look via holograms into the minds of people like writers, composers, political thinkers, pilots, nuclear scientists, presidents, for any strange shapes? Do we jail people for off-the-cuff suggestions or comments made in social media or for comments and curses from the heated arguments that can take place in those discussions?
The FBI and other spying agencies are not only looking for subjects to investigate. They are fabricating them. It is big business—from apps to airport body scanners, orbiting satellites to retinal scanners, and it’s all gotta go. Or the word democracy will, piece by piece, vanish from our history books. And that will be of value to no one, not even the spies. They’ll be left like those plane crash survivors in the Andes that devoured the dead victims to survive—like cannibals.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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Spies R Us
Posted on February 1, 2012 by Jerry Mazza
This time it’s with smart phone apps and a request from the Department of Justice that seems harmless enough, or is it? It asks social media to “Please review the information (RFI) that is attached. The FBI is conducting market research to determine the capabilities of the IT industry to provide a social media application. The tool at a minimum should be able to meet the operational and analytical needs described in the attachment.” Market research for the FBI and DOJ, really?
Those requests include, “ . . . Using capability requirements attached, as a ‘white paper’ guide for developing solution(s). Demos may be provided on a limited basis. This RFI will be updated to reflect potential opportunities to provide demos, if they are deemed necessary.” Hmmm, what kind of demos could those be? It goes on . . .
“Finally, please note that this is not a request for proposals [just capabilities] and no submissions will be accepted as offers for award.” So you’ll be offering concepts for social network spying on your dime. “All submitted solutions should include price estimates for the respective solution(s) which will be reviewed and used for market research and planning purposes.” Planning for what? Ah, you know.
“All questions are due on January 27th. All responses will be considered and issued as an attachment to this RFI for clarification. The responses will be provided by February 1st. All responses to this RFI are now due February 10th.” Sounds like George Orwell wrote it.
Among the goodies of the gee-goggling on social media, we will find “likely developments in the situation of future actions taken by bad actors” and “pattern-life-matrices to support law enforcement planning,” reports Fierce Government. Go figure that one out. Who’s planning to do naughty things and blabbing about it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or whomever, Native Americans sending smoke signals from mesa to mesa?
“Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations.” Thus spoke the “bureau’s Strategic Information and Operations Center . . . in a Jan. 19 request information posted to FedBizOpps.
Now you may actually believe that they are just referring to social media, including that which has gained prominence in academic writing. In fact, FG points out “that an analysis published by the Rand Corp. of tweets using the #IranElection hashtag during 2009 and early 2010 found a correlation between appearance of swear words and protests. The study also found a shift that indicated the protest movement was losing momentum when swearing shifted from curses at the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to curses at an opposition figure.” It’s anybody’s guess, isn’t it?
But this takes the cake: “A March 2011 paper published in the Journal of Computational Science (abstract) also posited that movements of the Dow Jones Average could be predicted to an accuracy of 86.7 percent by changes of national mood reflected in Tweets.” You didn’t know your little tweets could affect the stock market. Well, according to The Economist, British hedge fund Derwent Capital Markets has licensed the algorithm to guide the investments of a $41 million fund. No wonder Britain’s economy is sinking faster than the Titanic.
Now if the naïf you are thinks this all stops with social media, the Washington Post, reports, “FDA staffers sue agency over surveillance of personal email.” Now, we’re not talking about Suzie and boyfriend hashing over the days’ events. Here’s how the story goes . . .
“ . . . The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.
“The surveillance—detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington last week—took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.
“The startup screen on FDA computers warns employees, ‘you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, including any communication accessed or sent from the machine. This specific message has appeared since at least December 2010. Read . . . documents compiled as part of the lawsuit against the FDA for monitoring personal communications on work computers.
“Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes . . .
“Copies of the e-mails show that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers.”
Imagine the chutzpah of the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, specifically designed to monitor the safety and quality and side effects of drugs and food, actually trying to deny the conclusions and opinions of their own doctors and scientists concerns over certain drugs and/or food products. It’s nuts!
Rightfully, the doctors and scientists say “the government violated their constitutional privacy rights by gazing into personal e-mail accounts for the purpose of monitoring activity that they say was lawful.” I mean we are not only headed towards 1984. It seems we have entered it decades ago, both literally and figuratively. What’s next? Kindergarten drawings, term papers, doctoral theses, operation manuals, appliance warrantees, scripture, advertising copy, subway posters, bumper stickers?
And finally, I got a notice today from my favorite search engine that “We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read.” Gee, I wonder what they could be? That list that scrolls down every source I’ve Googled in the last couple of days or weeks as I do research for my writing? I was wondering about that.
But Google continues, trying to be informal, “this stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at http://www.google.com/polices. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012.” The subtext is to take them or do your research somewhere else.
But what I called ‘listing all the sources I used for research recently,” they call their third helpful addition—and for these reasons. “When you post or create a document online, you often want others to see and contribute. By remembering the contact information of the people you want to share with, we make it easy for you to share in any Google product or service with minimal clicks and errors.”
Fellas, thanks, but I’m a big boy and don’t need a big brother. I can deal with the time or energy it takes to re-Google an info source I used again and again for more info. What I can’t deal with is having all these sources staring at me in a bold-faced long list so that anyone else can read my screen at liberty and what I’m working on.
None of this is really a joke. We need privacy to live good, sane lives much more than we need to be spied upon by what’s turned into an industry of government spies. What’s next? Do we look via holograms into the minds of people like writers, composers, political thinkers, pilots, nuclear scientists, presidents, for any strange shapes? Do we jail people for off-the-cuff suggestions or comments made in social media or for comments and curses from the heated arguments that can take place in those discussions?
The FBI and other spying agencies are not only looking for subjects to investigate. They are fabricating them. It is big business—from apps to airport body scanners, orbiting satellites to retinal scanners, and it’s all gotta go. Or the word democracy will, piece by piece, vanish from our history books. And that will be of value to no one, not even the spies. They’ll be left like those plane crash survivors in the Andes that devoured the dead victims to survive—like cannibals.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.