That is why (especially local) news broadcasts have so many "community interest" segments. What children are doing during recess at this primary school, the person who supplements his income (so he can barely pay rent and buy food) by fixing bicycles on his doorstep, how the person who lost an arm at work has adapted to a new life, etc. "See? We care about the common people and want to document your successes, trials and tribulations." Because the media care about us, it makes them more trustworthy. When they say the other side started the war and we are victims, it must be true. They would not lie to us - the people they care about.

Usually that means that the media is too neutral and not biased towards the ruling party/regime or right wing enough. In the UK the BBC has been accused of the same thing. The BBC is not 'left wing', it's just 'reasonably' neutral (most of the time) or if you will just a lot closer to neutral than other broadcasters.

Also in 'the real world', there aren't really any "liberal" news publications - just publications which stick to what a certain demographic want/expect and supply to demand, but without really breaking rank. They will also usually support some party or other and be biased.

Let us not forget, however, that we mostly hear about "the media" from "the media." And, each and every time we encounter certain terms, such as "media," we always are presented with "lean-to words" planted next to them: "liberal media." This is a standard mass-psychology technique. But, I digress.

In the case of what's happening today with regard to "1984," my primary concern is altogether different: it is that we have embraced "internet" to a ridiculous degree, and a very dangerous one. Now, there's gobs of money (with which to buy all the "hoodies" you want ...) by setting up something like Facebook. But we are not pausing to consider: what information is being made available to third parties; who those third parties are; the people who work for those third parties; and what can be done ... to an entire nation ... when you have exhaustively-complete information concerning millions of its citizens as individuals.

In Orwell's book, "Big Brother" was watching you, and he didn't say a great deal about what was being done with the information. Today, it's not just that "corporations" are watching you. It's that this information is freely available within companies, to unknown people who should not be trusted, and that people have no idea what is going on. If they realized what the danger was, they would act very differently.

There was a pop song in the 1980's: "Some-bod-y's watch-ing me." Little did they know.

And ... "this is our industry." Therefore, when the unthinkable happens, there will be hell to pay and we will be among the ones paying.

Actually regarding catastrophic repercussions from the Information Overload I doubt that much will come of it, that it is doubtful that some Untrustworthy Other can or will make use of the sorts of data that corporations keep on us. I don't like the idea of such an invasion of privacy but I don't expect "a hard rain is gonna fall". Granted the degree is totally unprecedented in human history and not only how much data is kept but the ability to process all that data has increased as well and in quantum leaps. That said, it seems to me that the most common targeting, especially militarily, is very specific - Do the most damage in the least time at the lowest expense. The only variation from that in history has occurred when politics, philosophy or religion are factored in. During the Pogroms in Russia, the Holocaust in Germany and the Turkish Armenian Genocide specifics didn't matter as to whether you were a target or not. The perpetrators didn't care whether you were active or passive, dominant or submissive, engaged in threatening activities or not, rich or poor, male or female, old or young.... all that mattered was that you loosely belonged to some group they found offensive or useful to obfuscate their own moves and you were a target. In both cases the information required to flip the switch from Friend to Enemy is completely cursory and has always been readily available even long before the internet existed. What you had for dinner or what movies you watched, even how much money you spent on baubles last year are of little interest to any sort of terrorist group.

Perhaps exactly because it is so huge and unprecedented is why it will be so hard to put it to any important use beyond marketing. It seems premature to suppose the sky is falling.

Knowing that you and the military think that way ... how about this? A woman comes home, goes in the bedroom to kiss her girl goodnight and finds her shot in the head. The next morning, a thousand crimes of this nature happened the same night. Chillingly, when plotted on a GPS map, the crime scene sites form the shape of a scimitar.

The next night it happens again ... in altogether different towns ... and not always the same crime. But each time it happens, the criminals exploited perfect knowledge of these people's habits, and perfect knowledge of when the victims might be "home alone."

And so on. There is no pattern. Hurriedly, authorities shut down blocks of the Internet and vacuum for clues. But the crimes keep happening. Slowly, they realize that the data might have been collected over the course of years. It isn't being distributed real-time on the Internet . . .

In a matter of days, sheer terror grips the entire country. No one feels safe, anywhere anytime. Someone knows everything, and is using this information against the country in a way that has never been done before. People lose faith that they are "being protected," just as they did in the second book of The Foundation Trilogy when the oracle ... was wrong.


- - - -

Now, that's only one scenario. But, you get the idea. It isn't "a thunderous explosion." It is attacking citizens. As individuals, not as groups. And, it is exploiting: knowledge.

"This, too, is War." It's a type of War that has never been fought because it has never been possible. But, it is possible now. And the information needed to wage that war is ... unprotected, and available "en masse."

We need to be very un-conventional ... very diabolically creative ... to think outside every box. Because, criminals and psychopaths and enemies do that. We're not wearing tin-foil hats when we do that.

If you're not sure, you have a long way to go. But at least maybe you started. It's all your choice.

Part of what made the attacks of 9/11 succeed was that the plan was simple involving a handful of men in only 3 groups with only a slight variation on what millions of passengers do every day, board planes and 2 out of 3 succeeded, only 1 failed, a common at that level 50 percent failure rate. Had that number been 1000 groups and 1000 planes (or home invasion which millions do not do unnoticed daily) the opportunity for variables, unforeseen random events, is increased by many orders of magnitude with a high degree of likelihood of being such a large blip to have been discovered before anyone even boarded a plane. This is the problem with conspiracies - with greater numbers comes greater chances of discovery and failure. This is why historically lone gunmen succeed and, for example, The Bay of Pigs was a fiasco.

Obviously massive campaigns can and do succeed, such as D-Day, but part of the reason for that is that the goal is equally diffuse as the means with many possible variables still resulting in the success of knocking a hole somewhere in a huge line of defense. There is a huge difference in a campaign at the front lines and one behind the lines where the odds are so differently stacked.

I'm not saying there is zero danger, just that there is not yet cause for alarm since the odds are not in favor of utilizing Internet data for large scale covert actions.

PS Why won't this display the percentage character?

@sundial: Do you think that the criminal(s) would have not done the crimes (even if in a different manner and with different targets)? Moreover, realistically, doing this on a massive scale... Do you really think it's possible without preemption?
I read part of your posts on this forum on this kind of subjects and you really seem to have something against the corporations... I'm not saying you are wrong, yet you get the scale wrong... There are countries that right now, because of corrupt politicians and big corporations the people are almost starving and work impossible hours.. And yet, your greatest fear is that some one will start a mass murder campaign just to scare people into anarchy?

Collecting data on everyone is NOT going to stop violence. It didn't prevent the Boston Marathon bo*bing. Also look at the recent shootings and killings in movie theaters, schools and colleges. Where was the NAS to prevent this stuff if they are collecting data on everyone to prevent crimes on humanity?

It's impossible! It's requires lots of money, many powerful super computers, NAS/IT staff and etc to track billions and billions of souls out there. Not to mention but the majority of collected data is probably trivial stuff anyway.

Although large-scale campaigns are possible and something to be watchful of, the greatest danger is small-scale operations that "go under the radar." For example, identity theft. Having so much data available that can fall into the wrong hands makes it easy for those with the will to steal someone's identity. Someone with sufficient resources (enough money to buy data about a few hundred people) could steal the identities of a large number of people and make a lot of money, while destroying the lives of hundreds of people. Focusing on the potential for large-scale activities also blinds people to the more serious threat they face. The hordes of information collected about the daily activities of individuals makes it much easier for a person, company or government to target an individual, family or small organisation. I want to break into your home (to steal, wait to ambush you and take you hostage, kill you, whatever). Your "dossier" shows that you usually use your bank card or credit card to buy groceries at the nearest supermarket on Saturday mornings. Can I use that information? The problem is not information being recorded, but the storage of aggregate information.

Just because no amount of information is capable of stopping ALL crime, not the least of which is lone gunman spree killers, it is a non sequitur to assume data has no effect on crime because it simply has dramatically stopped not only crime of individuals against others but crime such as misscarriages of justice. The database of DNA alone, not to mention registering of sex offenders and indeed all arrests, has already done a great deal to improve public safety while helping to eliminate false or mistaken incarcerations and even executions. Criminals know it is far more difficult to pin a crime on someone else or elude justice than ever before.

Most of the comments here are not stating what you are but the opposite with some going so far as to worry that someone could use the data for a covert military assault and increase violence causing a terrorific reduction in perception of safety. There is little doubt that the internet is the Game Changer of Game Changers but that implies that it is so big that it must be a mix of good and bad and what that is depends a lot on your point of view. Dictators hate it as is obvious by their pathetic attempts to stop people from knowing their dirty deeds. The arrow of progress shows that systems and the quality of life improves as transportation and communication increase, unless perhaps you live in a stone age tribe and the far advanced outside begins to encroach. Still on a local scale even they benefit from improved communication but not likely from the internet. Most lives on this planet are part of fairly advanced civilizations already improving from the Internet. I suspect that overall trend will continue.

It's not just "dictators", but any regime which serves to keep a certain social and political elite in power, at the expense of the majority, while maintaining the illusion of democratic processes.

The regime with it's allies in the corporate world either gets involved in the www/internet, especially 'popular' sites like the main social networks, or it censors them as is the case in countries like China.

The 'takedown' report can make some interesting reading: http://www.google.com/transparencyre...=GB&period=all

(it's useful to have this one big compliant US based corporation to go to instead of lots smaller orgnanisations...)

That's before you get to the 'right to forget' the right to be forgotten however...

http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...otten-removals

In a nutshell, rich and influential people, pretty much want to be able to force the leading search engine provider to remove details of their past exploits - which is actually censorship.

A search engine should trawl the web indiscriminately and just show the user the results, anything else isn't a search engine, but a propaganda dissemination tool - and tantamount to censorship.

... as a completely irrelevant part of the overall scheme. The impact of the airplanes was largely symbolic, but also intended to create enough chaos that everyone would be totally caught off-guard when the demolition charges exploded.

The true nature of the conspiracy becomes obvious ... and, horrific ... when the third WTC building collapsed, hours later. This was the building in which New York City's terrorist-response center was located. This building, although damaged somewhat less severely than others in the area, dropped into its own footprint in six seconds, just had both of the tallest buildings in the world. You can watch videos of it doing so ... and you can watch as many other videos of controlled demolitions (both successful and failed) as you please ... and there is no question what you are actually looking at. According to plan, the entire emergency response team including the Mayor of New York would be killed in their supposedly uber-safe command center.

Especially in the case of WTC 1&2, this required technical skill possessed by very few companies in the world. (Under different circumstances, it would be the ultimate credit that would drive everyone on Planet Earth who needed a demo job, to wait in line to do business with you alone.) But it also demanded an extended and protracted lapse of internal security ... especially in the case of #7, which (because of what it housed on its middle floors ...) should have been profoundly guarded at all times. Like I said, it's hard to wrap your mind around the possibility of what actually occurred. And, to comprehend the level of psychopath who would engineer and execute it. ("Soldiers and conventional warfare," by comparison, is the safe, far-away from-here stuff of The History Channel.)

The very simple fact is that "no one was [seriously] thinking in this way, or on this scale," and the evildoers knew it. They were therefore free to execute their plans more-or-less at their leisure.

People like to debunk "conspiracy theories," because it's a helluva lot more comforting to accept the official cover story. It's really hard to wrap your mind around the possibility of what actually happened. (Just as it was difficult, fifty-odd years ago, for Americans to comprehend "a right-hand man coup d'etat" happening in Dallas, although European newspapers comprehended it instantly. Their history includes such events.)

But we have to "comprehend" things like this. These people have hearts as black as night, they have cunning, they have patience and time, and they know how to avoid drawing attention to themselves. They know how to exploit your trust, and your national hubris and naivet. When "virtually everyone in the western world" is spilling his or her guts, and exact location, onto the Internet, and with nothing (not even the National Security (sic) Agency) to throw the necessary veil of profound(!) secrecy around it . . .

. . . this means . . .

. . . W-a-r.

War such as no one in human history has ever experienced. War, not on the evening news, but in your neighborhood, slipping between the fingers of law-enforcement because of perfect knowledge which might have been gathered years before and maybe which not need be "transmitted" now.

Only the Greeks, fighting an otherwise conventional war against the Trojans, showed comparable creativity. But their war was, "necessarily, 'conventional.'" The scope of possibility in the present scenario is vastly enlarged, and so we must assume that its exploit will likewise be something that we have never seen before and therefore do not now expect. The only thing that we can say, and with absolute certainty given the truth of human nature, is that it will come. We have to be thinking in these terms, and getting others in power to think in these terms also. Because, someone else out there, surely already is.

I take it you have a link to statistics backing this up?

Using quick reply/edit will eat your %s: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...gs-4175538910/, go to "advanced" mode to avoid.