DATA TROLLING, NSA, AND HIGH OCTANE SPECULATION
I
have to admit, I am more often than not intrigued by all the articles
that regular readers here send me, and there are times I wish I had a
professional paid staff to sort through them all and blog about them,
because so many good contributions “fall through the cracks” simply
because I do not have time to blog about them all, plus maintain some
sort of semblance of oversight and moderation of the comments sections,
and do talk show appearances
and research and write books. Sadly, so much is lost every two weeks
when I go through the accumulated emails, and make selections of things
to blog about.This one, however, I have to talk about, for it invites and almost compels speculation about the real motivations swirling around the NSA/Ed Snowden affair. This article was sent to me by a regular reader and contributor of articles, and it’s so important that I have to bring it to your attention, not just because it’s important on its own merits, but also because of the type of speculations it compels in the context of the NSA/Snowden affair. First, the article, courtesy of Ms. P.H.:
Pentagon looking for ‘Big Mechanism’ to mine health data
Now, beyond the obvious implications that the Pentagram as hardly what one thinks of when one thinks of “Neighborhood family physician” or even a health insurance pool, what might be going on here?
Ostensibly, the report is about mining or trolling for medical data, and “assembling it all in one place”:
“Medical researchers have searched for years for a system that can find information located in various reports and combine it into one place. The philosophy behind the Big Mechanism is for researchers to be able to find new information found in the various scientific reports and papers published around the world and then absorb that information into their ongoing work.To be sure, an ability to track diseases via real time monitoring of their reports would allow specialists to have a real understanding of the vectors of infection, and this, in turn, could be a great boon to immunologists and other medical specialists in combating various diseases. Alternatively, such data mining could also provide new insights into the study of genetics and human history and origins.
“The program is an example of bioinformatics, which involves managing, mining and interpreting information included in biological reports and data.
“STORY: Pentagon on watch for disruptive technology worldwide
“Officials and researchers throughout the government have been targeting ways to examine more data to find treatments for various medial ailments or to track inventions that have the potential to disrupt U.S. military efforts. The Pentagon has launched a new project called Technology Watch/Horizon Scanning, which aims to track developing technologies around the world that could either aid U.S. military efforts or seriously disrupt existing military plans.
“The DARPA announcement seeks researchers from universities, government and private industry to propose how to build the mechanism and weave data mining into ongoing research. One government-affiliated think tank and contractor, the MITRE Corp. of Bedford, Mass., is a leader in data mining research.”(Emphasis added)
But the involvement of well-known defense contractors like MITRE and of agencies such as the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency(aka Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) in the effort says something else.
Ever since the story of the Edward Snowden affair and the ramptant NSA electronic surveillance campaign began to break, I suspected, and stated publicly, that the real reasons for the spying was not about combatting terrorism, but about the ultimate in insider trading mechanisms and maintaining an advantage over competitors in a world were information processing and electronic financial transaction are the bedrocks of economic power. Economic power, in turn, is the basis of military power.
So the article above is in effect disingenuous to a certain extent, in that the ability to assemble all this data mining “in one place” is precisely what the Utah NSA facility is all about. But the article does give us a much better hint and clue into what kinds of surveilling is being done: every scientific paper in pdf form, every patent posted on a government site, every e-book, every blueprint, in short, virtually anything of a technological nature anywhere will be mined.
This is turn will be passed through various filters of an Echelon-like nature – intelligence, counter-intelligence, disciplinary and technical filters such as physics and all subdivisions thereof, aeronautics and space technologies – you name it, will then sort the data and collate it, flagging certain things for human review and evaluation, which will be passed along to various committees for recommendations and policy formation.
In other words, in addition to the economic nature of the surveillance program, one is also looking at another phenomenon. Years ago, Lt. Col. Tom Bearden, (U.S. Army, Ret.), speculated that the Soviet Union had established an analog version of this data-mining operation, a vast bureaucracy rooted in the Soviet Academy of Science to mine every western scientific journal, paper, and patent, and to flag articles and papers for further review and evaluation. Nazi Germany had a similar organization called the Forschung, Entwicklung, und Patente under the auspices of the SS and SS Obergruppenfuehrer Emil Mazuw.
DARPA’s involvement here suggests that we are looking at a similar tip of a very large national security iceberg, one that has all the hallmarks of being a part of a postwar Mega-Manhattan Project sized entity combing for anything of a technological and scientific nature to enable it to confront its most pressing long-term strategic problem: the UFO. And make no mistake, this data-mining operation will have(and probably already has) a UFO-reporting and data mining component. One is looking at another sure sign of what Mr. Richard Dolan has aptly described as a breakaway civilization. This implies, in turn, that the “war on terror” may have been the excuse to create and expand the data-mining activities of this group for purposes entirely unrelated to terrorism.
No comments:
Post a Comment