No matter how hard I try, I'm just never cynical enough. I keep writing these alarmist, over-the-top headlines--Bush Warrantless Surveillance Looks at 'Everything Including Aunt Molly', Of Course Bush Warrantless Surveillance Is Illegal, Of Course Bush Warrantless Surveillance is Against Americans--and they all come true! And when the rest of the press was focusing on the "wiretapping" verbiage in the original Times stories, we--thanks to alert reader philosophicus--insisted that the real story was not voice but email surveillance (The Network Architecture of Treason), showed that massive email monitoring was not just technically feasible, but easy and cheap (ibid), and we explained the data mining technologies involved (Weapons of Mass Surveillance). Again, they all came true! We were ahead of the story (Muggles Catch Up To The Blogosphere). So far, the only alarmist headline that hasn't come true is Of Course Bush Surveillance is Ratfucking, but we're patient. (Oh, ratfucking and blackmail). And that's why I'm in the market for free, encrypted email.

In today's Christian Science Monitor (and why not Pravda on the Potomac or Izvestia on the Hudson? Wait! I think I have the answer!) we read:

The US government [outlaw Bush regime] is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

Silly terrorists! Blogging about their plans! And in English! But I think we know who the "terrorists" are, don't we? Anybody who causes any Republican anywhere to wet his bed. For any reason at all, starting with (say) buying a pro-Constitution bumpersticker over the Internet. Or by standing up for science at a School Board meeting.

The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited [by Bush] with helping to foil some plots [like that fiasco to blowtorch the Brooklyn Bridge]. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, [that is, the lives of some Americans] the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.

"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them...

Fortunately, terrorists only buy certain kinds of food...

A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together.

What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated.

And naturally none of the information will be privatized, and all of it will be totally secure.

But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists [political opponents], or sift for key words ["Constitution," "privacy," "King", "tyrant," "weasel," "Christianist"], but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions [win elections in 2006 and 2008], he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.

For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.

And, naturally, people like Kos, or Atrios, or Jane, or Arianna, or Josh would always fall into the category of "bloggers arguing" and never into the category of "terrorist." Not even when they start doing real reporting and start to influence elections.

Understanding the relationships among people, organizations, places, and things - using social-behavior analysis and other techniques - is essential to going beyond mere data-mining to comprehensive "knowledge discovery in databases," Dr. Kielman wrote in his November report. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

Ah, "knowledge discovery." Remember that line the Republicans always used to use? "We're from the government and we're here to help you?" They seem to have replaced that with "We're from the government, and we're here to know you. Everything about you." Brrrrr! Naturally, Feingold--please don't go up in any small planes, Russ; Democrats keep dying when they do that--is out front on this issue:

Renator Feingold is among a handful of congressmen who have in the past sponsored legislation - unsuccessfully - to require federal agencies to report on data-mining programs and how they maintain privacy.

And the article closes with this chilling statistic:

Indeed, even data that look anonymous aren't necessarily so. For example: With name and Social Security number stripped from their files, 87 percent of Americans can be identified simply by knowing their date of birth, gender, and five-digit Zip code, according to research by Latanya Sweeney, a data-privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.

Of course, there's also the question: Will ADVISE work? I don't mean work for the people getting the grants, I mean, will it detect terrorists? Newsweek thinks not, and Moon Over Alabama contributes an interesting data point: In Germany, the authorities there tried a similar program, Rasterfahndung, against their own homegrown terrorists, the Red Army Faction. But in ten years, no RAF member was caught, because they were careful to lead statistically blameless lives. In other words, they kept the patterns of their lives normal, and so the pattern recognition software didn't detect them.

And so with this program. Data-veillance can't catch real terrorists. If you reverse engineer the purpose of the program out of what the people it can catch, the targets turn out to be not terrorists but English-speaking U.S. citizens who use email and blogs, and present certain patterns in their speech or in their purchases.

And those people would be?

NOTE Image of Smirky from Wampum. Extremely alert readers will recognize the diagram in the background from The Network Architecture of Treason--it shows the "hubs" that most Internet "packets" (email, websurfing, file transfer, etc) pass through on their way to their destinations. Because there aren't many such hubs, and most of them are on US soil, it is, in fact, practical to surveill most everything that goes on the Internet. Which, as the Christian Science Monitor Article shows, is exactly what they are doing.

UPDATE But you know, I just had a thought. When Hillary wins in 2008, we're going to be really glad we've got this thing. For example, rooting out all the Christianists like George Deutsch who've infested the civil service will be a lot easier and faster... I mean, twenty-something Heritage Foundations whackjobs like Deutsch in the CPA were the ones who turned Iraq from a problem into a Clusterfuck, so they're next door to being traitors anyhow...

Maybe this data mining thing isn't so bad after all...

ADVISE--Of all Sauron's works the only fair...