Saturday, November 18, 2017

Politics Now, Continued

Here is the conclusion to Chapter 23 “Human Terrain” from Annie Jacobson’s The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency:
For the Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program, DARPA [Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency] requested from Congress $28 million to develop computer algorithms to allow machines to scour vast arrays of text-based messages from “free text or semi-structural reports, messages, documents or databases,” so as to pull “actionable intelligence” out of ambiguously worded messages. “A key DEFT emphasis is to determine the implied and hidden meaning in text through probabilistic inference, anomaly detection and disfluency analysis.” The only way to determine if a person’s message or part of a message was anomalous or irregular would be to have a much larger database of that user’s messages to compare it to. How DEFT is used in the United States is classified, and DARPA declined to answer general questions. These are just three [analysis of patient data across electronic medical records systems, Nexus 7 (monitors social networks), and DEFT] out of nearly three hundred DARPA programs that were in development for fiscal year 2015, with a requested budget of $2.91 billion, not counting classified budgets.
It is impossible for American citizens to know about and to comprehend more than a fraction of the advanced science and technology programs that DARPA is developing for the government. And at the same time, it is becoming more possible for the federal government to monitor what American citizens are doing and saying, where they are going, what they are buying, who they are communicating with, what they are reading, what they are writing, and how healthy they are.
All this raises an important question. Is the world transforming into a war zone and America into a police state, and is it DARPA that is making them so?      


















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