Archive for October, 2007

Thanks to my brother for sending this along. He mentions that the technology behind the AT&T datamining program that has liberals’ panties in a bunch is fairly straightforward and mundane.

The technology is based on “communities of interest.” To people in marketing, you would think of social networking and the ability to target advertising toward people that have common interests. If you are a leftist moonbat convinced that the government and evil corporations are out to get you, you think of tracking protesters and terrorists.

You can see code snippets and a boring flow chart here at Wired.

From the article:

Programs written in Hancock work by analyzing data as it flows into a data warehouse. That differentiates the language from traditional data-mining applications which tend to look for patterns in static databases. A paper published in 2004 called ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems shows how Hancock code can sift calling card records, long distance calls, IP addresses and internet traffic dumps, and even track the physical movements of mobile phone customers as their signal moves from cell site to cell site.

With Hancock, “analysts could store sufficiently precise information to enable new applications previously thought to be infeasible,” the program authors wrote. AT&T uses Hancock code to sift 9 GB of telephone traffic data a night, according to the paper.

AT&T already has the ability to track your movements throughout the week by plotting what cell towers your phone pinged or communicated through. I think it would be a neat feature to have a phone tell you about points of interest based on your location. But unhinged privacy advocates are avowing to leave their cellphones at home and communicate with smoke signals.

One moonbat in particular, by the name of “spiedupon”, in the comments of the article clearly has his walls at home lined with tin foil. He writes:

Since I became politically active in opposition to the war in Iraq, the spooks have stolen large quantities of clothing, put caustic substances in my soaps and shampoos and on my water bottles, run into the side of my van, cut a bolt half way on my car so that I narrowly escaped death, turned the lights on in my car numerous times, stolen books, stolen bras, tee-shirts, and jackets, damaged many pieces of electronic equipment, pushed so hard on my front door trying to get in while I was in the shower that they splintered the tops and bottoms off my dining room chairs that I had under the door knob, attempted to enter a motel room with an electronic card while I was in the restroom (but I had furniture pushed up against the door), shut off my cell phone remotely numerous times, censored my e-mail, and committed many other serious crimes with the aid of electronic surveillance equipment.

No logical person would think I was a threat to the security of the US. Some high ranking person (or persons) with secret police powers is (or are) mad. There is no greater threat to the United States than unchecked secret police with electronic surveillance powers and the keys to everything. It must be stopped and those involved must be removed from power and held accountable.

In a later post, he rambles about how the police are all in on the government conspiracy because they refuse to listen to him or review security tapes at the malls where he shops and claims that the “spooks are stealing from him.”

Catching the spooks on camera will solve the problem only if the police will arrest the perpetrators. The spooks have stolen from me where they were filmed by several businesses security cameras in several jurisdictions and after repeated calls to one jurisdiction about multiple occasions of thefts, thefts stopped at that location stopped, but the police officially refused to talk to me about the thefts. At another business location, the police refused to look at the cameras saying that they had a “good relationship with the business and did not want to disturb their privacy and had other very pressing business to attend to.” At a retail location, the sheriff refused to look at the security cameras that could identify the thief. At that same location, on the occasion of an earlier theft, I viewed the security tapes with the business manager and from the tapes, it appeared that the clerk was involved and the clerk was fired. However, that situation appears to have lead to some undercover efforts to stop further harassment.

I think its clear that the real threats to society are unhinged moonbats running around the malls demanding to look at CCTV tapes in their never-ending quest to spot “spooks.”

I asked my wife who she thought crazy people feared were after them before the invention of the US Government and the CIA. Being the brilliant and insightful woman she is, immediately responded to me, “That’s easy. The Church. The Pope. The Spanish Inquisition.”

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