Download full manual here:
documentcloud.org/documents … acted.html
What they observe isn’t the issue. What they DO with what they observe IS, such as the mandates to police departments to profile with categorical labels; “Terrorist”, “Extremist”, “Anti-Semite”, “Racist”, and so on. These labels are being applied by seriously unintelligent police officers who also act with the presumption that such labels are accurate - the very cause of societal corruption.
Hmmmm, actually, the DNDO- Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, is quite a wise name to scan for, and should not leave.
Wave and Flu is a remarkably unwise name to scan for, and is wasting that glorified googlebot’s energy. I can claim I was surfing, caught a wave, but had to leave early cause I came down with flu symptoms.
Unless of course these are known codewords- in which case now everyone knows were searching for code words. If were searching for codewords, then I say we pass a law so these hippies demanding to know this stuff in lawsuits can be lied to, given substitute codewards in exchange, that are not the actual codewords. Like, what happens if some terrorist faction is using ‘Biscuit’ for dirty bomb- are like, 7 months into planning this operation they completely planned over the internet, and are nearing to launching, then one sees the results of this lawsuit and find oddly the word ‘Biscuit’ is on the list. Wouldn’t that just fucking drop the ball that the FBI is undercover posting there too, getting ready to launch a bust. We’d be fuck.
I humbly request the government to lie about mundane shit like this.
Dunno… didn’t see Walker’s name on that list anywhere… hmmm
We should have a philosophy essay contest, discussion the history of a random classical philosopher, incorporating all the words above in that list into it.
The funniest thing about this is that the people who most commonly use most of these terms are…
The Department of Homeland Security.
Q - Is is possible our entire counter-terrorism apparatus is just spying on itself?
A - It is not just possible, it is certain.
Meh, who cares? The actual process that the Government uses to monitor communications and to decide which communications TO monitor isn’t even vaguely known by anybody that’s going to participate in this thread, or in any blog that anybody who participates in this thread will read. As such, the word list itself tells us nothing. All we know for sure is that there’s not a warm body reading over every email and forum post that contains one of these words- else we’d all be employed doing so.
You can also be assured that the people previewing and assessing threats are not geniuses. 
Americans in this thread:
“we should be lied to more”
“meh. Who cares?”
I would have thought that you as a Christian conservative would care, but…
This is a DHS report, not a blog. I don’t get much of my information from blogs. Perhaps you’re getting confused with someone else.
I don’t know as much about the NSA as I do about our local UK equivalent GCHQ but I have a pretty good idea how they decide which communications to monitor - they basically monitor everything they can get. The key question is how do they analyse the vast amount of information that flows through their systems and determine which communications are worth of greater scrutiny.
By that standard, everything tells us nothing.
They don’t need to have a human reading every email and forum post, you can get machines to do that. But ultimately, their vision is for all of us to be ‘employed’ doing this, just without them having to pay us. Gradually we are made more and more afraid, more and more suspicious, until we no longer trust ourselves and carry out pre-emptive self-censorship of our own thoughts. It’s an obvious trajectory.
Another obvious trajectory towards a point where the government both admits and denies terrorising its citizens in the same breath. It used to be that the state would simply deny that it murdered its own civilians and blamed it on someone else. Now we live in a situation where they are saying ‘well, we USED TO do that sort of thing, during the Cold War, but not anymore’. The next step is ‘yes, we do still do that, but no we don’t still do that’, i.e. pure doublespeak.
Have you ever read 1984? It’s basically an early training manual for the war on terror. That camera in your computer that’s currently pointing at you without you even realising that you voluntarily brought it into your home - Orwell foresaw all that in the 1940s.
No, but they are neurotics.
I didn’t say it was, see? But whatever you’re citing, it refers to the DHS in the third person, talks about ‘their manual’, and calls them Big Brother, so I’m going to go out on a limb and assume it’s not an official DHS report, whatever it is. It’s an opinion piece designed to evoke particular emotional content that isn’t justified by the actual data provided.
Yeah, they have machines that look for terms in connection with other terms. Like for example, 'snow' is going to be searched for in connection with...I don't know, some chemical compound that snow is a slang for, or it's purpose, or the last name of some scientist that invented it, or whatever. So the machine is going to make sure that no human being has to actually look at you talking about how it snowed yesterday, because nobody in the NSA cares.
Which is why I said "Meh, who cares?" The implication of what you cited is that if you say 'snow' or 'pork' some Government agent is going to hack your computer and start looking through your porn stash. Nothing even vaguely like that is going to occur- in all likelihood, nothing that we didn't already know about or assume is going to occur. In fact, if you read the manual, it's purely about the monitoring of publicly available information like tweets and blog posts...if you don't want the Government looking at your tweets, I think you are misunderstanding the function of Twitter. There's nothing here to get excited about outside of our imaginations filling in suggestive blanks that were presented to be suggestive.
And you’re saying it’s the Government that is causing this attitude, and not the sensationalism that surrounds what they may or may not be doing?
It’s a fucking word list used for searching public media. It would be obscenely incompetent for any security/intelligence agency to not be watching stuff like that. Seriously- what’s the alternative? That we decide it’s evil or unconstitutional or a violation of human rights for the Government to read what people publicly post on the internet?
Oh, you mean the text I cited? That’s from RT.
I would say it is wholly justified, in fact they haven’t gone far enough in criticising this.
You’re missing the point - why pick ‘snow’ in the first place?
So unless something is truly ‘news’ in the sense of being new, you don’t care about it?
That’s an EXTREMELY odd position for someone who proudly labels himself a ‘conservative’ to take. Let alone a Christian conservative, someone whose morality derives from some ancient text. I think you should reconsider what motivated you to say ‘meh, who cares?’, i.e. why you cared enough to say that.
That’s exactly how they want you to think - don’t fundamentally question whether an open forum where you are limited to 140 characters and where people are frightened into only saying what is deemed acceptable is a tool for social control, just point out that since it’s in public it isn’t really spying.
This shows that you really don’t have a clue what’s at stake here. This isn’t about invasion of privacy, it’s about an atmosphere and mentality that will lead to self-censorship, it is about breeding compliant citizens.
In which case why did you post on the thread?
It is several different factors. This isn’t about stopping people from using the word ‘snow’, it’s about making people think ‘maybe I shouldn’t write ‘snow’ because they might be watching’, it is about replacing the ethereal omniscient, omnipresent God of your tradition with a technocratic God, but with the same implications of damnation, fire and brimstone and all that crap. One tool of social control being replaced by another.
Why, what do you expect they will find? The vast, vast majority of people talking about this stuff are the security services themselves. Spies spying on other spies - doesn’t seem like a necessary process to me. Hardly ‘obscenely incompetent’ for them to not being doing this. In fact, it’s a combination of obscene incompetence, corruption, and people like you arguing their case for them because you are scared that has led us to the point where you, a reasonably intelligent person, has been so scared by your own government attacking you that you’ll object to anyone who protests the advancement of the security state.
And this is why the American Christian mentality and style of argument is such a waste of time - because it breaks everything into polar opposites, denies all subtlety, and invariably leads back round in circular fashion to ‘I am right, because I am right’. No wonder you’re having such a problem understanding this.
I’m not really sure about the justification for the sentence “includes hundreds of words that set off Big Brother’s silent alarms”.
The terms are listed as search terms. Whats the justification for thinking that they ‘set off alarms’
Glancing through the mission statement it looks like the actual aim of this organization is to collate data from social media posts about specific events which are in progress. This is actually pretty sensible, imo: in any emergency situation these days a wealth of data is posted instantly online and collating this data could be useful in forming a timeline and understanding whats happening.
There is no mention in the mission statement of monitoring for for comments that “reflect adversely” on the government.
btw - pork is on the list because of food/health scares. ‘snow’ because of potential weather disasters, both of which come under the ‘Items of interest’ list
Snow is a slang term for cocaine, often dealers will use slang or obscure terms in order to bypass such security measures, or go unnoticed. The front line measures are computers, which pick out text or phone conversations, the grunts in the data depts will then review the walls of text/audio recordings. Skipping over obviously harmless posting or calls about the weather.
I used to deliberately use words like bomb, cocaine, kill, infidel, ricin, botulinis toxin and TNT in all my phone calls, just because I don’t think MI5 are working hard enough.
I don’t think you’ve understood the list very well. It is a list of search terms for searching social media sites i.e. things that have already been made public (blogs, public facebook pages etc). It is not a list of things being screened in private communications or telephone calls.
Also, they aren’t trying to catch coded posts to intercept drug deals and the such. At least not according to this booklet. They are searching and documenting events as they happen on the internet and collating data from numerous sources. This is actually pretty standard - all major news agencies and large companies have departments/ people who do the same thing: making reports to keep up to date with their own public image as well as to track what’s going on in the world. So for example, if 700 people start tweeting about ‘major snow storms’ then the DHS will pick up on it. If 700 people start tweeting "I found razor blades in my coke’, you can be sure that analysts working for coca cola will pick up on it pretty damned fast and will start writing reports to keep bosses informed.
This isn’t high class spy shit. I know someone doing a similar job for a reputation management firm and its about as dull a 9-5 type thing as you can get. They search for key terms using custom built software, scanning for anything that looks pertinent. When they find something that fits their breif of what they are looking for, they have to file a brief report about it. This information is collated by someone a bit higher up the chain, and normally eventually gets delivered in the form of condensed weekly reports or something. If the situation is more urgent, it may get collated faster to make sure that the higher up guys dealing with the press and stuff are as well informed as the press are, because it can be really damaging to be caught unaware. This kind of data collation/analysis is a major industry these days.
Also note, the word ‘snow’ is clearly listed under the weather/disaster/emergency section in between the words ‘sleet’ and ‘blizzard’.
(EDIT) I should further point out that anything that isn’t pertinent will never get seen by anyone but the 9-5 grunt being paid next to minimum wage to scan through stuff. Also, unless they have extraordinary manpower, they are probably only searching major blogs and face book pages rather than the whole internet. The software is configurable to search pre-made lists of important social media contributors. No one has the manpower to sift through every instance of the word ‘pork’ on the internet and write a report about how and why it was used. So if you’re trying to ‘trigger the silent alarms’ you really aren’t wasting anyone’s time but your own.
I don’t know why you’d be frightened. The guidelines of the leaflet clearly state that any personally identifiable information has to be removed for the reports (names, company position, contact info etc) so the person reading the report will have no idea who wrote what they are reading.
Yeah, right, and Mark Zuckerberg won’t ever sell your personal data for profit…
If you don’t believe that the guidelines in the report are being followed, why would you be worried about the contents of the report?
Who says I am worried? To me this is just one document among thousands of similar ones. My argument is that they are monitoring a phenomenon that they have created, and that the logical conclusion to this process is voluntary self-censorship. Worried? No, I’m far beyond just worried.