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| "Whoa! Down, boy, down, Fido," warned Barack Obama, concerned that the energetic Dominique Strauss-Kahn was about to launch himself at the First Lady and hump her shin right there in the Blue Room. "Or it'll be time for that trip to the vet we talked about." |
There's been a lot of speculating about scenarios involving electronic spying recently (and I add to the irresponsible speculation in my upcoming Taki's Magazine article). So, let's consider this scenario.
Imagine that it's early 2011 and you are concerned that French Socialist warhorse Dominique Strauss-Kahn might get elected president of France next year. Perhaps you don't think that's in the interest of the international financial community or America or Nicolas Sarkozy or whatever.
Imagine that it's early 2011 and you are concerned that French Socialist warhorse Dominique Strauss-Kahn might get elected president of France next year. Perhaps you don't think that's in the interest of the international financial community or America or Nicolas Sarkozy or whatever.
If you had access to all of DSK's electronic communications, what kind of data mining algorithm would you craft to ferret out DKS's greatest vulnerability? How could you best sift through terabytes of data to find DSK's Achilles heel?
Well, you wouldn't. You'd just call up your press secretary and ask, "What's the gossip about DSK?"
And he'd reply, "He can't keep his hands off the women. Fashion models, wives, maids, whores, nuns -- he's out of control, a real life Pepe Le Pew."
"So, just to toss a purely hypothetical logical conception out there, if an extremely expensive lady of the evening were to, say -"
"You are overthinking this, Monsieur President. To entrap DSK, there's no need for a large budget."
The more general point is that a lot of the information that the public assumes must be secret is actually common knowledge among the tiny percentage of people who are paying attention. To find out about it, you often just have to ask.
Big Data is of limited usefulness against DSK, Steve. Like you said, just ask someone who is paying attention. They can tell you what you need to know.
ReplyDeleteBig Data is extremely useful in identifying and assessing DSK's henchmen, allies, supporters and fellow travelers. Once identified and prioritized, these targets can be monitored and dealt with as appropriate, from remote electronic surveillance to field agents with ricin-tipped umbrellas.
You might want to make sure your ducks are lined up before putting out too many speculations in Taki's. Edward Snowden's girlfriend came forward today and she's not Chinese. And the Boston marathon bombing didn't have much to do with Aaron Swartz.
ReplyDeleteImagine that it's early 2011 and you are concerned that French Socialist warhorse Dominique Strauss-Kahn might get elected president of France next year. Perhaps you don't think that's in the interest of the international financial community or America or Nicolas Sarkozy or whatever.
ReplyDeleteSure, because derailing DSK really changed the course of events in French politics. How would DSK have been any different from Francois Hollande, aka Mr. Segolene Rodham Royal?
How did the leaking of those sets of divorce papers on two Illinois politicians in 2004 change the course of events in American politics?
ReplyDeleteAnonydroid at 7:31 pm said: Nice little blog you got here. Be a shame if something were to happen to it.
ReplyDeletecountenance: Different enough for Hollande, one might think.
Our host: great caption!
Interesting speculation, except that Strauss-Kahn was part of the banking/financier elite "socialist" or not.
ReplyDeleteThat photo - what a find!
ReplyDeleteAnd is there anyone here on iSteve who really is surprised that the TLAs have access to all the major search engines, social media sites and telecommunications hubs? I assumed this to be true a long time ago. And if they weren't going to haul Steve off to the gulags, they weren't going to do it to me either, so why worry about it. The reality is, the government is going to do it regardless.
On the subject of noticing - I wonder about the motives behind the neutering of google gaydar. The fact that GG existed and was relevant - indicates that homosexuality is a phenomenon that has far more detectable attributes than merely the desire to have sex with members of the same sex. And just as we are supposed to think that race is just skin color, so to are we supposed to think homosexuality is just a desire in some men to have sex with other men.
Just as race implies a clustering of phenotypes - bone density, height, distribution of bone and muscle, type of muscle, skin color, hair type, hair color, criminal fraction or criminality, IQ - so too does homosexuality imply a clustering of traits. There are many little tells that homosexuals have, a clustering of traits. Neatness, affinity for art, high culture, interior decorating, working as air stewards, dressing up in general, theatrical or showy professions, concern with appearance, cattiness, facial expressions - all of these little tells enable a person to enable a person who notices to do a little detective work and wonder if someone is gay.
What naturally follows from that are articles that ask the question, and it is this emerging information that causes GG to be possible. (This is different though from wishful thinking of the homo community, which does not make a given person gay.)
The clustering of gay traits gives a clue as to the cause. Most of these traits appear to be related to the ways of thinking, indicating that it is the way the brain operates that is different. My guess is that what is happening is that gays are born with a female type brain, however with the mostly male hormone milieu, this results in something effeminate but not quite feminine.
Now, why would individuals at google want us to not be able to estimate how gay a given (famous) person is? Concern for privacy? Desire to keep the restricted knowledge within the homo freemasonry? (Note that gays themselves often talk about how good their gaydar is.) Is it that they don't want others to know, so that they might have a hope of converting some straight male? I don't know, but it seems to be a major thoughtcrime to notice things these days.
The older I get, the less and less I care about thoughtcrime.
An anonymous commenter posted a link on 12/20/11
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said...
DSK was known in France to be some sort of Don Juan.
His political entourage apparently did not ignore he participated in pleasure parties.
Therefore some conspiracy to ensnare him might appear somewhat plausible.
But DSK himself was aware his opposants would try to bring him down with women.
Some fortuitous encounter with a gorgeous playmate might have raised his suspicion.
However one guy knew no centerfold was needed to turn DSK on.
http://www.capitalstool.com/forums/uploads/post-1360-1306512429205.jpg
Here's the soundtrack to go with that image.
ReplyDeleteHow did the leaking of those sets of divorce papers on two Illinois politicians in 2004 change the course of events in American politics?
ReplyDeleteHmm good point. Obama probably wouldn't have become president.
Gossip can provide one with leads, but surveillance yields blackmail-bankable facts. Perhaps Congressman aren't inclined to nickle-and-dime the NSA's budget: bad for the NSA - bad for the Congressman. The NSA seems to have plenty of money - enough to pay Snowden $200k a year - more than is made by the directors of many federal agencies.
ReplyDeleteIt yields other things of interest as well - insider information that can be turned to great advantage. Perhaps the NSA has it's own hedgefund too.
"The more general point is that a lot of the information that the public assumes must be secret is actually common knowledge among the tiny percentage of people who are paying attention. To find out about it, you often just have to ask."
ReplyDeleteThat's what Yahoo Answers is all about.
No centerfold was needed to turn DSK on.
ReplyDeleteThat he managed to become fully operational at the sight of this taupe-model means his condition was much, much worse than what was whispered.
Mr. Sailer, there are more pressing issues, like the dramatic bullying of Hispanic students in our schools.
ReplyDeleteIf you knew what to ask, the CIA is able to give you an answer. But to ask you have to think and that is painful. The idea of PRISM is that the machine will make unnecesary to think and will ask and answer its own questions.
ReplyDeleteYou sometimes bring up swimming pool drownings, and about how black kids are "hardest hit". Here's a recent article from The Atlantic on it:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/a-racial-history-of-drowning/276748/
""Once whites discovered swimming, blacks were increasingly excluded from public pools and lifeguarded beaches," Mr. Wigo told her.
As a result, many minority parents never learned how to swim. Adults who can't swim often fear the water and, directly or indirectly, convey that fear to their children."
"The African American experience of exclusion from the opportunity to swim in Fort Lauderdale [home of the National Swimming Hall of Fame] was commonplace throughout America in the first half of the twentieth century, leading to what has been described as a cultural disconnect between the Black community and swimming. One of the tragic consequences of this disconnect is that African Americans drown at a significantly higher rate than Whites."
Steve, you're not thinking correctly. Imagine a low-life, who wants easy money. What's easier than "carding," or breaking into, remotely, say Aaron's Art Mart, or Visa, or Mastercard, and downloading thousands/millions of credit card numbers, to be used for quick sale to other low lives in a criminal syndicate who run up said cards for quick cash.
ReplyDeleteNow imagine, say a lowlife gets information about an upright citizen, visiting say, "KinkyBadStuff.com" or whatever. Lowlife finds out said upright citizen is married. Lowlife blackmails said citizen, upright and upstanding, for $1,000 or an email to said spouse with email address attached gets sent with details of visits to the porn site.
Now multiply that by a thousand.
The internet allows lov-rent scams to be insanely lucrative, because the numbers add up very quickly.
This is also true for Stasi like operations, where you want to neutralize any protest, opposition, and the like, by focusing on key nodes. Threatened by the Tea Party? Find out which players are key nodes, organizers, leaders, and the like, and neutralize them. Not by firing squads any more than the Lives of Others Stasi utilized that. No, by harassment, intimidation, blackmail etc. so that all their energies are spent fighting off attack and not organizing say a massive recall campaign on your allies.
Big Data in that way keeps a regime in forever. Until there is no choice but violent revolution.
BUT ... BUT ...
Big Data needs Big Data Analysts. There is as yet no Person of Interest AI powerful enough to analyze data clusters, node forming, etc. That still requires a human analyst. Lots of them. And the guys required for this have common characteristics. They are young, male, White, idealistic, naive, totally adrift on how humans operate, gifted with abstract thinking and analytics, fueled by all the lies our culture tells, and with a hefty martyr/hero complex. They grew up on Harry Potter, Comic Books, Hollywood movies, all pointing to the same end for "outsider" heroes telling the truth. And they all believed, fervently, in the transformational lightworker nonsense of Obama. And are bitterly disappointed to see the reality of the cheap Chicago racialist hack. This isn't the Morgan Freeman they expected.
The Swiss could not keep their banks secret anymore, because too often the Germans and French would bribe clerks to give them thumb drives containing tax cheats. The Lagarde List showing the Greek tax cheats has been explosive there. Can Obama really keep his stuff secret, from all that money waved around at approximately 4.8 million security clearance holders and 480,000 contractors working for 2,000 firms? Really? With the Chinese and Russians and Iranians and who else just drooling at easy marks. Not to mention criminal gangs, and the like.
My guess, this is Putin's operation and way of saying, "You're Welcome" for Syria, Libya, etc. He's offered Snowden sanctuary. Lectured Obama on Privacy. Hilarious.
ReplyDeleteM.A. Rubio said...
Mr. Sailer, there are more pressing issues, like the dramatic bullying of Hispanic students in our schools."
Mr Senator, the Zoot suit riots were a long long time ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_Suit_Riots
Steve,
Great pic, Im sorry but that is now my facebook profile photo
All that above is just a long way of saying Big Data cuts both ways. Because the data is so big and so many work on it, it is bound to leak out. All over the place. Its one thing to have data sitting in a locked paper filing cabinet. Another to be on computer systems over 480,000 contractors access each day. There's no way it can be kept secret.
ReplyDeleteYes, the regime of Obama can use it target any and all resistance to its program, but said targeting is sure to leak out (and it has), because too many people are in on it.
Obama does not scale. Low level Chicago thuggery raised to Big Data levels are an open invitation to his army of Bradley Mannings and Snowdens to disclose and leak like crazy. For idealism, ideology, revenge on a fallen god, money, almost anything. And now that everyone knows about it, everyone will copy it.
Big Data can be collected, not as well, or as good, by screen-scraping Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc. It won't be as complete as the NSA's, but say, a million dollars for set up and bandwith costs, a bunch of servers, and maybe five-six top coders at $120K each, a year, you can find out nearly as much. Not geo-located mobile data (though I stress this MIGHT be possible through mining ad-serving data by running ads and generating reports) but certainly quite a bit using nothing but Perl libraries or Ruby ones to screen-scrape web pages and dump the results into databases.
And you could do the same node-denial strategies. Target say, key leaders of the Democratic party, in various states. Businesses can use it against Labor. Various countries can use it against US agents, spies, etc. The same technology can (and likely already is) used for both tax collection and evasion.
Like nukes, jet engines, automatic weapons, and radio, Big Data is just a tool. One that is so advantageous that everyone will want and get their own version, some better than others.
ReplyDeleteHow did the leaking of those sets of divorce papers on two Illinois politicians in 2004 change the course of events in American politics?"
Hmm apples and oranges I think.
As countenance said DSK isnt really all that different from Francois Hollande.
BO otoh did actually benefit from releasing the divorce records as he was trailing behind Jack Ryan and the centrist Democrat in the primary.
There is always a mysterious deus ex machina to get Obama out of trouble when he is trailing.
The divorce records in his run for Senator.
The very convenient economic crisis triggered by the bust of Lehman brothers and AIG right after his numbers took a beating due to the Palin effect in fall 2008.
God forbid the media would look too closely into it but BO's benefactor George Soros did indeed tear down a major western country's central bank and devalued the currency of one of the Asian "Tiger" economies almost singlehandedly.
Is it so unbelievable to consider this billionaire manipulator could create an economic "October" surprise in his own country?
Steve, having read your Israeli inside track on the US (I think you are right on that btw) you miss the big point.
ReplyDeleteThe US has included Israel as an adjunct partner to the "Five Eyes." the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and off/on (on again) New Zealand routinely spy on each other and pass the spy info on to get around legal restrictions on domestic spying. This started it is believed in WWII, and has continued through the Cold War.
So, PRISM is as much the US passing on data to the UK, which then passes on its spying on US citizens, allowing the DNI to hem-haw about spying domestically, within legalistic reasoning. The NSA uses the data, but did not itself collect it -- that came from the UK.
Or the Israelis. Who being somewhat (less now with Obama being in love with Muslims and jihadis) dependent on the US can be relied to play ball spying on us so we can pass around the spy on them.
A more cynical take would have the US government (which blocked China's Huwaei from selling telecom equipment in the US) approving of the spying as long as it is cut in on the end-product. I think this explains much of what has happened.
Israel is likely a junior "Sixth Eye" offering convenient cover for US citizen spying in return for more sophisticated US satellite intel, etc. Very likely the US government wanted to spy on its own government employees (who after all form the biggest regime change risk) and outsourced conveniently that job to the Israelis. All for satellite photos and the like.
Ot,
ReplyDeleteSteve, have you been reading about the new Pope's comments to a committee of cardinals about the "gay lobby" in the Vatican?
In Australian Rules Football, the move Obama is making in the photo is called a 'shepherd'. The escalation would be a flat handed fend-off applied to the face. This is known as a "don't argue".
ReplyDeleteGilbert P.
Dr Van Nostrand, the Zoot Suit Riots were between white sailors and Marines stationed in the city and Latino youths.
ReplyDeleteMr. Rutenberg, writing for the NYT, misread or forgot these 2 sentences in the original story,
She said the persecution, mostly by fellow Latinos . . .
a group of Spanish kids threw his sandwich on the floor . . .
and inadvertently used a misleading formulation,
There were allegations of bullying from fellow Hispanic students . . .
Those suicides happened in September and November 2012; for some reason, the NYT sees fit to print this story now.
I wonder why
More Benny Hill than Pepe le Pew.
ReplyDelete"Imagine that it's early 2011 and you are concerned that French Socialist warhorse Dominique Strauss-Kahn might get elected president of France next year. Perhaps you don't think that's in the interest of the international financial community or America or Nicolas Sarkozy or whatever. "
ReplyDeleteA but Steve, you seem to not understand that DSK was no socialist war-horse, au contraire, he was the French Blair, which is why Sarko appointed him head of the IMF. Had he been elected there would be no 75% income tax and certainly no Financial transaction tax while there would have been lots and lots of "rigour", as the French call austerity. So far as I can see only two people would have benefited from the fall of DSK; Sarkozy and Hollande.
"You are overthinking this, Monsieur President. To entrap DSK, there's no need for a large budget."
ReplyDeleteAre you actually crediting the Obama administration with being sober and restrained with tax payer money?
Their first instinct would be to use a Euro looking Hispanic prostitute at an inflated prices of 500$ an hour plus a suit paid for by you. Mexican women- doing jobs American women just want do!
Little did they know that before she could made her move he would pounce naked on a very rogue looking hotel maid.
"The older I get, the less and less I care about thoughtcrime."
ReplyDeleteBut you posted as Anonymous, so you must still care a great deal.
Still, though, if the trajectory really is down, as soon as you retire, could you please start speaking publicly, using your own name? Those of us who are younger -- thus further from retirement-- would appreciate it.
That's right, Whiskey: the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and . . . Israel, just one big happy family, united by a common tongue and a common origin, welded together by shared ideals and a common law heritage.
ReplyDeleteWait, what? One of these things is NOT like the others? Why, you're right! One of these things is NOT like the others. Must be that French influence in Canada. Eh?
"The older I get, the less and less I care about thoughtcrime."
ReplyDeleteBecause you're unlikely to have your pension stopped or your savings account emptied.
But a young person's career can be, as we've seen, derailed by the r-word, even if it's not justified - and one has to put food on the table.
It would be nice to have what I believe is called "f***-off money" i.e. enough that you can tell TPTB where to go ( even then, there are always lawsuits - in the UK, at any rate).
yeah but say you wanted to know something hush hush you could start with al the call s made fom the top and see where they call then the calls from those numbers and so on and soon a graphic is generated thats quite interesting
ReplyDeleteWow, I didn't realize until seeing this pic that Michelle is flatchested.
ReplyDeleteLittle did they know that before she could made her move he would pounce naked on a very rogue looking hotel maid.
ReplyDeleteIf only you knew what she did for a living wink wink say no more.
But you posted as Anonymous, so you must still care a great deal.
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying that I don't care at all, it's just that I care less than I used to, particularly IRL. I won't hold my tongue as much. Online I still care enough to post anonymously.
BTW I'm not even old, not halfway through my working career, even if it ended at 65.