We Want Information

The News:

"What do you want," asked Patrick McGoohan, in the Prisoner television series.
"We want information," replied the ominous voice representing "Big Brother".
"Whose side are you on?", McGoohan, who recently died, replied.
"That would be telling…. We want information..."
"You won't get it"
"By hook or by crook, we will."

In the 1990s, Lumeria and a handful of other companies and organizations were keenly aware of all the electronic information that was more and more becoming associated with individuals. Lumeria sought to create a super profile of an individual's electronic information which the individual owned and controlled limited access to using cryptography. Lumeria failed as a company but a few years later, the US government, under DARPA and Iran Contra's John Poindexter, would launch a program called Total Information Awareness.


When the New York Times reported on this program in early 2002, Russ Feingold inroduced legislation to suspend it's activities. DARPA responded to Congress by assuring it that the program was only targeting terror suspects but Congress nonetheless withdrew funding for the program.

Total Information Awareness is alive and well -- tracking everyone, from their phone calls to their credit card records. It should be noted that oft-maligned ex-NSA employee Wayne Madsen has been reporting this on his online news blog since 2005.

It could be argued that the government SHOULD have total information awareness but that argument only holds true if the government is acting within and for the law. As NSA whisle-blowers have pointed out, the program has been used for many things political, including targeting journalists.

"I think they went after anyone they could get -- including me." (Sen. Jay Rockefeller)

The Barack Obama administration will likely try to change the misuse of all of the information gathered about Americans however the government is a massive place, so will they really be able to accomplish this?

Terror changed our government. Politics and greed led to it's abuse. Fear clouded our ability to think straight. We accepted garbage information as valid and rejected valid information as garbage.

It's also interesting to note how readily we all give up personal information on Facebook! Facebook now owns this information. There's great business opportunity but yet invasion of privacy in all of this information. Imagine a future where you are physically unable to enter an airport until you pay your Blockbuster fee or even unable to use your credit card because of something disparaging you wrote on the web.

War On Terror Comes to a Sudden End


Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons'

Obama might like to see ex-Unocol consultant Hamid Karzai out of power in Afghanistan.

Federal agents raided the offices of a Western Pennsylvania defense contractor that has received millions in federal earmarks at the request of Rep. John Murtha (D).

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington's 20 most corrupt members of Congress:
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL)
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA)
Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-CA)
Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL)
Rep. Vito J. Fossella (R-NY)
Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-LA)
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA)
Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-IL)
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Rep. Gary G. Miller (R-CA)
Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-WV)
Rep. Timothy F. Murphy (R-PA)
Rep. John P. Murtha (D-PA)
Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM)
Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-NY)
Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
Rep. Harold Rogers (R-KY)
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK)
Rep. Don Young (R-AK)

Murtha is listed in their "dishonorable mention" section, along with:
Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA)
Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH)

Homeland Security (for sale)

Obama has a 62% approval rating (41% strong approval) in Texas and 60% (39% strong approval) in Tennessee.

Upcoming legislation in 2009: Economic Stimulus, Labor, Healthcare & Climate Change/Energy

Bush may be gone, but his influence -- and the forces that put him in office -- aren't.

Reactions:
Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience that he wants Obama to fail.

"Bush's decision not to pardon Libby has angered many of the president's strongest defenders. One Libby sympathizer, a longtime defender of Bush, told friends she was 'disgusted' by the president. Another described Bush as 'dishonorable' and a third suggested that refusing to pardon Libby was akin to leaving a soldier on the battlefield." (Dick Cheney biographer Stephen F. Hayes)

Your Job:
Get informative! Lets pend more time thinking about information, be it how to determine it's accuracy or how it gets created, aggregated, moved around, manipulated and re-used.

When you read a headline, how often do you challenge it's validity? Do you give more credit to headlines from the larger media outlets? Many people assume that for the most part, headlines are summaries of a story and stories are for the most part accurate, with few exceptions. If you analyze news stories over the years however you will find that many headlines mis-convey the story and stories often contains significant errors or omissions. The reasons for this are many -- from sloppy to manipulative -- often a media outlet simply reports what they are handed by a government official without corroboration. The result, by design or not, is to mislead and misdirect readers, sometimes affecting opinion and policy wholesale.

It's easier to criticize media coverage in hindsight than live, though when events are taking place is when it's most important that we understand them accurately.

For instance, prior to Bush's attack of Iraq, every major media outlet was reporting that that Iraq had WMDs, going so-far as to show satellite images and graphics depicting biological weapons labs. Most of these claims could be traced to Douglas Feith's office in the Pentagon and what would later be called the Niger documents. Some independent and foreign media sources at the time reported leaks of a CIA report stating that that Iraq was not developing WMDs and that the Niger documents were forgeries. Years later, after we attacked Iraq, this became "common knowledge' within the major news outlets, however at the time the independent and foreign media sources were widely disbelieved -- ridiculed to be absurd conspiracy theories. Small or foreign media isn't by nature more accurate than big media, but it shouldn't be discounted simply for being small or foreign.

The public doesn't always require the media to ram an idea down their throat to believe a falsehood. 2/3 of the public believed that Iraq had attacked the US on 9/11, likely due to the multiple insinuations that Cheney, Bush and their surrogates had been making.

Many news stories about terrorism went unquestioned by the public over the past eight years. Uncorroborated intelligence would be re-used multiple times to justify the reporting of new threats, often at politically opportune times. How many times has the US caught Al Qaeda's #2?

It's important to be aware of your assumptions when we're reading news stories and to not be afraid to question them, even if it means standing against the grain of what everyone else seems to believe. Good questions to ask oneself when reading a story include: What is the source of the story? How Many Sources Corroborate the Story? Who Benefits from This Story? Do the details add up?

Everyone has a slant -- I'm trying to be objective in this blog but just by including certain news snippets and not others, you could say that I'm not purely objective. It's interesting to note that sports and science journalism are more objective than political journalism.

When we get lazy with information, we're easy to manipulate.

Today let's get informative! What do you think about the future of information? Where are we heading as a society? What are your favorite information sources?

I'll start by listing a few of mine:

Open Secrets:
This is one of my favorites. The Center for Responsive Politics tracks political contributions of all kinds and presents the information in multiple ways on this excellent website:

Talking Points Memo
Josh Marshall is well-known among political bloggers. He often has inside-the-beltway scoops.

Five Thirty Eight
These guys bring the statistical approach of sports analysis to politics. Their state by state electoral projections gave me confidence early that Obama was most likely to win the election.

History Commons
This searchable site aggregates quotes and data from mainstream media articles around specific subjects, many of which became popular research topics during the Bush administration. Many might consider the research topics limited however it's a great idea and example of collaborative research.

Raw Story
Extremely limited, but I like sites that link to a multitude of news sources

Al Jazeera and Haaretz
Two of the best and most independent news sources in the middle east.

Google -- The online researchers best friend. Everyone knows this one, but I like to search for english versions of international newspapers in a country where you are interested in a story. For instance, years ago I discovered http://www.dawn.com by searching for "Pakistan and news and English".