Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation

June 30th, 2007 http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=956 Simulex Inc.’s Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation system is almost certainly how the priests of the technocracy are now maintaining “normal” operations.
The system allows for terra scale datasets with granularity of results down to one node (individual). It has a physics engine for tracking any number of people (or other elements) in virtual cities or spaces. It can correlate any amount of social, economic, political, environmental or other data with the behavior of groups or individuals on the ground. The U.S. Government, and some of the most powerful corporations on the planet are using the SEAS system.
There’s really no way to know how many ways this system is already being used against us. I tried to think about it for a few minutes and it’s mind boggling. “How isn’t it being used?” is probably a more interesting question. If the Architect was interested in tools that could help him more effectively run the Matrix, he’d have Simulex reps on the phone ASAP.
I thought about some of the high level but simple studies They could run to, for example, evaluate the overall effectiveness of the various control mechanisms most people have to contend with on a daily basis.
A status quo indicator could be easily devised that would show how effectively “normal” operations were being maintained. All They would need to do is track the time most people spend commuting to and from work, the amount of time spent at work, some guestimate about the time spent in front of television and computer screens at home and a final guestimate about the time spent on recreational activities outside of the home (live sporting events, movies, etc.). Plot those components as a single moving average. That’s it. If the line is sloping up, Their power is increasing. If the line is sloping down, Their power is decreasing. If the line is going sideways, Their power is staying the same.
Think about how powerful of an indicator that would be.
And that would be a boneheaded child’s exercise for the SEAS system.
The really weird and disturbing aspect of this is the level of granularity that it provides to the system operators. They admit that the system is designed to run simulations on a 1 to 1 basis. That is, it can simulate activities not just with some aggregate model based on limited samples, but with ALL nodes simultaneously in a population with terra scale data sets. Meaning, the focus could be on tracking and simulating the activities of any individual in the system.
If you’re like me, this is the point at which you will start to experience a vague feeling of foreboding because all of this seems somehow familiar, somehow related to something I’ve written about on Cryptogon recently…
In NSA, AT&T and the NarusInsight Intercept Suite, I wrote:

Are They building electronic dossiers on as many of us as they can? I don’t know, but it sure looks that way.

We must assume that they are using the full spectrum of surveillance information to try to PREDICT HOW EACH OF US IS LIKELY TO BEHAVE ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS. Where we go. Which routes we take. What we buy. Etc. All of these things can be broken down into a kind of moving average that wiggles around between an upper band and a lower band, kind of like a standard deviation from a mean. Stay within the bands, and the Magic 8 Ball probably won’t bother to flag your profile for closer analysis by some genius at the Terrorist Screening Center.
Obviously, most of us aren’t worth the attention of a human analyst, and they know it. Most of the sheep just go with the flock. They do what they’re told, shop at WalMart, pay their taxes, go to church, the end. More educated sheep read Business Week or the New York Times, etc. Within a fairly wide range of activities, it’s no more complicated, for the vast majority of the people out there, than the way pool balls behave as they bounce around the table and each other.
This is a key point, so I’m going to emphasize it:
These systems would excel at finding the artifacts, the outliers, the people who haven’t internalized the programming, but continue to act “normal.”
It would identify the thought criminals.
Recently, Michael Chertoff, the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, mentioned “clean skin” terrorists. These are people who appear “normal” in society, but are secretly plotting the next big terrorist event. How do you find the “clean skin” terrorists? Well, according to Chertoff, the U.S. Department of Magic-8 Ball Theories, Studies and Predictions requires every foreign traveler’s email address and credit card information. It didn’t occur to me before, but They already have this information—and much more—for Americans.
I’ve wondered why my site and thousands of sites like it are allowed to continue to operate…
Simple: More and better targeting data.
They don’t care about me, or what I’m saying.
They’re more interested in who’s paying attention to me, and people like me. Are those numbers increasing, or decreasing? What types of jobs do readers of these sites have? What is their income? What other sites do readers of these sites read? Do the people who read these sites continue to show up to work? (You haven’t been paying attention if you think that They don’t have this information.)
Whether or not you have anything to do with sleeper cells, “clean skin” terrorists, leaderless resistance movements, our outright “let’s shoot the bastards” insurgency movements, the list of usual suspects, I would almost bet my life, is being drawn up through the use of the NarusIntercept Suite systems for collection and the SEAS systems for analysis.
Who gets pulled for what probably depends on how seriously They feel threatened. The point is, these systems can model and assist with the visualization of any imaginable set of circumstances. We don’t know what criteria They’re using, but it is admitted that the terrorist watch list has ballooned to include over half a million individuals.
Do you think these systems have anything to do with the “out of control” expansion of that list?
I do.
This isn’t tinfoil. All I’ve done is make logical connections between two publicly admitted technologies that we know the U.S. Government uses. Look at how hungry that SEAS thing is for data.
Remember Russell Tice, the NSA SIGINT officer who had knowledge of a special access NSA operation that was so disturbing that he tried to tell the U.S. Congress about it?
What was Tice talking about here:

Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said.

An angle that we haven’t heard about. Since everyone and his dog knows about the mass surveillance, what could that angle be?
More recently, Tice said that the NSA intercepts of civilian traffic is “the tip of the iceberg” and says, again, that there is something else, something we still don’t know about. Here’s part of the interview between Tice and Reason:

REASON: What prompted you to step forward now?
Tice: Well, I’ve known this for a long time and I’ve kept my mouth shut…
REASON: You’re referring to what James Risen calls “The Program,” the NSA wiretaps that have been reported on?
Tice: No, I’m referring to what I need to tell Congress that no one knows yet, which is only tertiarily connected to what you know about now.

Ok, so the outrage that Tice was willing to ruin his life over is only “tertiarily connected” to the operation we already new about.
Tice continues:

In my case, there’s no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things.

The surveillance side of this is the chickenfeed. There’s something far more sinister than the simple surveillance… an angle we haven’t heard about yet.
Tice never did tell his story to Congress about this different aspect of the program.
Well, my guess is that it has something to do with providing surveillance data for this SEAS World Sim thing, and that individual Americans are being watched and potentially targeted with it. Tice’s background seems to involve a lot of traditional electronic warfare, radar and ELINT stuff. Maybe Tice’s deal involved the collection of the mobile phone GPS and/or triangulation data which would provide realtime spacial/geographic data to the SEAS system. In other words, SEAS sees you. They could bring up a map of a city and plot your path based on the information that your phone is exchanging with the mobile network.
Via: The Register:
Perhaps your real life is so rich you don’t have time for another.
Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.
“SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” the paper reads, so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners”.
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
SEAS can display regional results for public opinion polls, distribution of retail outlets in urban areas, and the level of unorganization of local economies, which may point to potential areas of civil unrest
Yank a country’s water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.
“The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides,” said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.
Chaturvedi directs Purdue’s laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS – the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc (http://www.simulexinc.com).
SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.
Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.
The US government appears to be Simulex’s number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.
Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA (http://www.darpa.mil) and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security (http://www.dhs.gov), where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.
…
Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.
Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.
One organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations, according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential recruits.
Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate what Chaturvedi calls a “like someone” with the same stats, but not the same name.
Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.
And with consumers already giving up their personal information regularly to websites such as MySpace and Twitter, it is not a stretch to imagine SWS doing the same thing.
“There may be hooks through which individuals may voluntarily contribute information to SWS,” Chaturvedi said.