Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
-- "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"

Let us discuss something that everyone may have forgotten...and which people probably do not realize has a very great effect on what's happening today. As is usual for what I write about, it will probably not be very pleasant.

The Information Awareness Office was instituted by DARPA in 2002, designed to bring together several projects already underway at DARPA involving the use of surveillance and information technology to monitor and track...well, threats against the state. Like terrorists. Everyone hates terrorists. You can read all about it at Wikipedia. It was full of fascinating things that completely demolished privacy, like Human ID At A Distance and Scalable Social Network Analysis. All of these combined to create what was called Total Information Awareness. I will quote directly from Wikipedia for this one:

The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists – and decipher their plans – and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts.
To that end, the TIA program objective is to create a counter-terrorism information system that:

1. Increases information coverage by an order of magnitude, and affords easy future scaling

2. Provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed

3. Automatically queues analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks

4. Supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and prospective courses of action.

It was a masterpiece of surveillance. Naturally, the whole idea of this huge invasion of privacy was anathema to the citizens of the US at that time, since they saw that the whole thing could be, well, used against them against of against putative terrorists. After a suitable amount of outcry, the IAO and TIA were shut down. Some of the more useful projects that made up the IAO were renamed, but it all mostly went away.

Or so everyone thought.

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you.
-- The Police, "Every Breath You Take"

What actually happened is that all of the defense contractors that were working on the TIA were all let go and then immediately re-hired as all of the TIA projects were privatized. Most of it went over to Booz Allen and other national security contracters, which is unsurprising. We then began bringing it back piecemeal into the alphabet bureaucracies. It began to be inserted into the commericial enterprises of our consumer society. People know various parts of it by various names: PRISM, the NSA Data Center, and so on.

But frankly, the whole kit-and-kaboodle doesn't need to hide anymore. Total Information Awareness is back from the black budget and here to stay. Don't you feel safer now?

Just food for thought.

Nocte Auriga

Gladius acutus veritatem.

It has been a while since I posted, but that is OK; I have been very busy. Now it is time to get some of those thoughts back on paper. Or on screen. However one prefers to term it.

Right now my mind is on sexual harassment, especially in that of the subcultures I am familiar with, geek and skeptic. It is no secret that policies and opinions on harassment are changing in those communities, especially with the very public focuses on things like Elevatorgate and Dragon*Con. These things have been kept silent too long, especially amongst geeks, and need to be dealt with properly. They are being dealt with properly, for the most part. However, even in 2013, there are still disturbing things happening.

No, not good. And not to be tolerated either. But what should one do?

I agree with this article: It is time to name names. I believe this should always have been done, but I am a...I hesitate to say courageous person, because that does not match well. It is more accurate to say that I have no fear of dropping nukes and burning bridges for the sake of the honesty and to bring down the iniquitous. That is more of a crusader ethic than a courageous or heroic ethic. I am willing to be the hardass so that others do not have to be.

That brings me to think...there are many who will not feel comfortable in naming names. But I would. So I offer that as a service; if there is a name to be named, let me know and I shall do the naming, the shaming, the outing. I can take that heat; I can be that shield. The truth will make you free.

Doctor oportet destrui

"—E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together."
     - Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess"

Tonight I am listening to this playlist. This is the sort of music I have come to like best, a soundscape of a certain grimmer note. It is is comforting; it relaxes me and enables my focus. It allows thought to rest with crystal cold in my brainpan.

I believe that everyone has music that speaks to them. Dark ambient seems to speak best to me. Perhaps it complements my outlook on things. Perhaps I just like dissonance or unsettling noise. It does not matter; what matters is that I know what I like and seek out what I like. The one mistake I avoid is assuming that others will share my tastes unilaterally; this is definitely not so.

"The needle slips in and out
Never was one more pricked by poison
Then by that transcribed in clear detail.
Who says the sword is mightier? Certainly
Not the proverb."
     - Gustav Hendricks, "Does the Ball have a Point?"

I am currently attempting to create a complete chronology of Doctor Who. I had created one previously, separated into Old and New Who sections, but my roommate AliQ told me that it was too restricted in what was decided as canon. I completely disagree, but I concede the point; this is a more inclusive chronology. Anyway, the main source that I am using is the Doctor Who Reference Guide. It is the most complete listing of media that I am aware of.

And it is finished, in its basic form. I'll have to go over it later and proof it.

In principio erat nisi.

"You are the sound that I hear.
You are the sound that I hear.
We're not standing.
We're falling."
     - Fever Ray, "The Wolf"

I do not know why I am doing this blog. I really do not. Lately I have become convinced that I am probably mad and creating a blog ex nihilo for no purpose whatsoever seems to fit the profile of madness, but beyond that flimsy excuse for reasoning I cannot come up with a damn thing. I do know that I say 'madness' because I have never been diagnosed with a mental issue of any sort (and I doubt I will ever be), but I am also too quirked and strange-thinking to be anything other than eccentric. Except I am not rich, therefore I cannot be eccentric. So I must be mad.

We will not talk about how that string of thinking is maddening.

I suppose part of a maybe reason to do a blog is that everyone that I know seems to have Something To Say, important things or studious and erudite things or interesting things. I do not have any important or erudite or interesting things to say. I do not even feel that I have wise things to say. I do not know what to say; I have spent my life feeling that way and I do not think that will change. I rarely consider what I have to say to be important or worthwhile or any sort of thing worth listening to. I have been told that most people feel that way. To quote:

"You want to be famous and rich and happy
But you're terrified you have nothing to offer this world
Nothing to say and no way to say it
But you can say it in three languages"
     - KMFDM, "Dogma"

Except that is not the real quote. The lyrics for Dogma are spoken by Nicole Blackman and those same lyrics are a short rewrite of her poem/spoken word "Indictment", which may be found in her book Blood Sugar.  I prefer "Indictment", even though it is without any punctuation at all. While "Dogma" is succinct, "Indictment" tells the whole tale.

See? Nothing important there. No insight. Just regurgitation of fact.

In the space of silence since I wrote that I closed my eyes. I had a vision of a body hanging from a noose, no details, all in shadow, but it was swinging. You could hear the creaking of the beam, see the sway of shadowed body as it goes from side to side. The room was dusty, all made of wood - you could smell the dust.

Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005) is one of the most fascinating court cases to read, primarily because of its ultimate scathing destruction of YECreationist/ID attempts to embed itself permanently in the fabric of science. Everyone should read about it.

See? Non sequiturs. Things that pop through my brain one by one. There is an actual running link between Fever Ray, my inadequacy of speech, Nicole Blackman, a vision of a hanged body, and Kitzmiller, a logic path that I can barely describe in its convolutions.

I am tired. There is nothing to see here.