Personally, the question seems to me to go to why this is funded by the US government at all, and much more importantly why it's funded by "homeland security." ap ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin@unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu Assistant Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_ University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA New Book: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/178592.ctl On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, Alex Halavais wrote:
I seem to be missing something here. Of all of the things a government could do that would be objectionable, using tools to aggregate and help analyze open source intelligence surely cannot be that evil. I presume that you don't object to governments reading what others have to say about them--this isn't "mind reading," it's "reading." And while analysis of texts certainly requires interpretation by the researcher, I see no particular reason to believe that making use of computer tools to assist in that analysis would necessitate poorer interpretation. I seem to recall a discussion at some point that spoke in fairly positive terms about nVivo, another tool used in open source intelligence.
If you are worried that poorly thought out actions may result from good intelligence, that is another issue. It seems that there is a significant breakdown in the process of communicating intelligence analysis. But I think that comparisons to the Total Information Awareness project are extraordinarily counterproductive. I think making use published, open material is an important line of defense for any nation or police force. It is only a "thought crime" if the writers are persecuted for stating it. Otherwise, it's called "listening." Indeed, I see no reason they should limit their analysis to foreign newspapers.
Sure, I would love it if they would open up their analysis for public consumption. But besides the closed nature of the results, is there any reason that this should be different from text analysis systems being used to help people keep up on the web today. For example:
Google News: http://news.google.com/news Google Zeitgeist: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html Technorati: http://www.technorati.com/pop/news/ Blogpulse: http://www.blogpulse.com/ Global Attention Profiles: http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman We Feel Fine: http://wefeelfine.org/
Not to mention the dozens of products designed to map texts (e.g, http://www.leximancer.com/gallery.html).
I'm not convinced that providing tools for a government to better understand public discourse is automatically a bad thing.
Alex
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