Homeland Security to Compile Database of Journalists, Bloggers
biglawbusiness.com
biglawbusiness.com
If you sign on with Cision, for example, you can pull an up-to-date list of reporters in any U.S. market, filtered by beat, outlet, channel, topic, etc., and send an email to all of them by pushing a button. Then you can click over to the monitoring dashboard and pull media stats by reporter, keyword, channel, etc. Can't remember if Cision does sentiment but I know a lot of others do.
This story is being reported and commented like "DHS seeks to create new tech capability." The reality is more like "DHS seeks to choose an agency who will use commercial OTS products to help DHS do something that any major brand has been doing for years already."
This is standard public relations practice. Everyone should have a list of press contacts and influencers.
This is the wrong hill for liberals to die on.
They also sell their own data, when not constrained against doing so. The many state budget crises have apparently exacerbated motivations to do so.
All that said, I can't view this DHS initiative as a positive development, WRT domestic monitoring.
Actually, I can see the point of passive monitoring. And I can't help but believe it's already done. The difference here may be the DHS, specifically, and the public nature -- announcing the initiative. Therefore perhaps also who will have access to the resulting system or systems.
Maybe I'm biased by my news consumption habits, but I worry about politicizing and agendas, when the DHS is involved.
We'll see a lot of sock and meat puppets from the central panopticon playing in this discussion. They'll say how normal this is, nothing to worry about and insult those who are worried. Watch them, it's quite amusing.
You're not a tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorist, now are you?
Question for down voters: Can you seriously make a case that he is not a conspiracy theorist?
• Obama was not born in the United States.
• Climate change is a hoax.
• Ted Cruz's father may have been involved in the Kennedy assassination.
Want more? Just Google for Trump and conspiracy theories, and you'll find plenty of articles covering a bunch of them. Example [1].
> Unless it's well-known fact or something agreed on by everyone, making such a bold statement would require you to prove your case. Not the other way around.
He tweets about this stuff frequently. Those tweets are well covered in the press. So yes, it is well known.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-conspiracy-theor...
Second, what's the purpose of this? I can imagine it'll be quite useful to BBG properties like Voice of America, RadioFreeEurope and generally US government PR/propaganda, but how am I supposed to not worry that this will be used for censorship via US-based companies and some future law combating "fake news" and/or "hate speech"?
2. Data is valuable.
3. You can't. As you built more capabilities to process the data it becomes more valuable. Incidentally that is why I think Facebook is so valuable. Cambridge Analytica managed to affect U.S. elections with a small subset of this data.
Is this an accepted fact now? I know they tried but is there hard proof that without them it would have been a different outcome?
The headline isn't and shouldn't be that Cambridge impacted the election. This is obviously not true. There are other similar claims about other entities impacting the election with positively miniscule spends on adverts that are even less true than this, but they seem to be taken as gospel as being true by some.
The headline should be that we all collectively give FB, Twitter, etc. as much information as we wish, are encouraged to provide more, and thus increasing the value of us as the commodity being sold.
I resisted FB for many years, until I saw it could be used as an communication system for my family (who were not responding to emails/calls). It has some value to me there.
But the sheer scale of the humint gathering, the analytics they are putting in place, boggles the mind.
Cambridge used a bad data broker, and did exactly what OFA did 4 years earlier. Mebbe we should focus our anger on this, and demand no microtargeting using socially derived data for elections. I didn't see anyone protesting that in 2012. Why now in 2016?
That's part of an important question to answer ... as we cannot excuse violations of privacy when it goes in a direction we like, versus a direction we don't.
Just one out of the many links for the lazy, written just after the 2012 elections: "How Data and Micro-Targeting Won the 2012 Election for Obama - Antony Young-Mindshare North America" (https://www.mediavillage.com/article/how-data-and-micro-targ...) .
Reading it now is just, I don't know how to say it because English is not my mother tongue, but maybe ghoul-y is the word? That feeling when you watch a series-B horror movie and you can see the monster is in the house, is just in the room next to the victim, but you can't tell the victim because, well, you have no psych powers. Just copy-pasting some of the paragraphs from that article (which I had found after a quick google search) shows that we should have known about this monster since at least (now) 6 years, we should have seen that it was in the room just next to us, but we did nothing, we only made it worse:
> How did Obama win? (...) At the heart of these two strategies, was micro-targeting.
> Micro-targeting is the ability to dissect in this case, the voter population in to narrow segments and customize messaging to them, both in on-the-ground activities and in the media. (...) But it was the sophistication and the scale of how they executed this strategy that in the end, proved the knock-out punch for the Democrats.
and especially
> The Obama camp in preparing for this election, established a huge Analytics group that comprised of behavioral scientists, data technologists and mathematicians. They worked tirelessly to gather and interpret data to inform every part of the campaign. They built up a voter file that included voter history, demographic profiles, but also collected numerous other data points around interests … for example, did they give to charitable organizations or which magazines did they read to help them better understand who they were and better identify the group of 'persuadables' to target.
and
> That data was able to be drilled down to zip codes, individual households and in many cases individuals within those households.
and then it gets WTF-y (pardon my French):
> Volunteers canvassing door to door or calling constituents were able to access these profiles via an app accessed on an iPad, iPhone or Android mobile device to provide an instant transcript to help them steer their conversations. They were also able to input new data from their conversation back into the database real time.
> The profiles informed their direct and email fundraising efforts. They used issues such Obama's support for gay marriage or Romney's missteps in his portrayal of women to directly target more liberal and professional women on their database, with messages that "Obama is for women," using that opportunity to solicit contributions to his campaign
That said, there's plenty to be mad about, but it's more in how Facebook was sharing everything for you (part of the reason I never made an account there) and less with the wranglings over what a ToS violation means on top of that.
That being said, I think DHS might be going a bit overboard as far as the monitoring goes.
[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/cambridge-an...
Similar companies have been employed by virtually every other presidential candidate in the last decade.
We can't be mad at CA without being mad at the entirety of industrial political adveritising.
Facebook is powerful. I wouldn't call what Cambridge Analytica provided valuable.
That's exactly what it is. When a government's filled with extremists, bet on the extreme.
Is it available to non-US companies?