Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

Dear Group Members,

I want to share my article with you. This is about the link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues. The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature.

Subject : In a fast society slow emotions become extinct.
Subject : A thinking mind cannot feel.
Subject : Scientific/ Industrial/ Financial thinking destroys the planet.
Subject : Environment can never be saved as long as cities exist.

Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking.

If there are no gaps there is no emotion.

Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/ language) for emotion.

When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/ industrial/ financial/ fast visuals/ fast words ) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing.

There comes a time when there are almost no gaps.

People become incapable of experiencing/ tolerating gaps.

Emotion ends.

Man becomes machine.

A society that speeds up mentally experiences every mental slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.

A ( travelling )society that speeds up physically experiences every physical slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.

A society that entertains itself daily experiences every non-entertaining moment as Depression / Anxiety.

FAST VISUALS /WORDS MAKE SLOW EMOTIONS EXTINCT.

SCIENTIFIC /INDUSTRIAL /FINANCIAL THINKING DESTROYS EMOTIONAL CIRCUITS.

A FAST (LARGE) SOCIETY CANNOT FEEL PAIN / REMORSE / EMPATHY.

A FAST (LARGE) SOCIETY WILL ALWAYS BE CRUEL TO ANIMALS/ TREES/ AIR/ WATER/ LAND AND TO ITSELF.

To read the complete article please follow any of these links :

PowerSwitch
EnviroLink
StrategyTalk

sushil_yadav
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment

Americas coming robotic army

America's robot army covers the growing number of robotic equipment being deployed or developed for use by the American Military.

The scenario being developed is where Robots replace infrantry troops, where networked surveillance equipment is able to track everything moving in whole cities, etc. Rather than place flesh and blood troops at risk, it will be the machines instead.

One thing that strikes me is this is an utter violation of Azimov's Rules of Robotics. Okay, Azimov was a science fiction writer, so maybe that doesn't give his opinions a lot of weight. But he was prescient enough to see the possibility of self directed robots. As computer power grows, so does the processing capabilities that can be built into a robot, and the greater degree of self autonomy can be programmed into that robot.

At what point does that robot become so autonomous that you can simply shout an order to the robot "Kill the enemy" and the robot is in charge of determining just who the enemy is? We humans have a tough enough time determining who the "enemy" is, that is determining which people on the battlefield should die or live. That's what "collateral damage" is, a failure of adequately determining the proper enemy.

What hope do we have of adequately programming a robot to do this well?

The article also discusses surveillance equipment of scary proportions. Under development is a whole range of small video devices, for example, that can be scattered throughout a city to blanket the city with surveillance. Once a city is blanketed with surveillance equipment, every movement is visible and trackable. Then, Human ID At A Distance is a project which would allow identification of people from that surveillance (HIAAD was part of the Total Information Awareness project).

The article discusses its use in war zones. Suppose it is deployed in the home grown war zone? American cities, that is.

Technology is technology, and it is a matter of the humans who deploy the technology to determine its use.

Utopia? Maybe...

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

The guy is a University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, also happens to oversee a blog, a music label and a microbrewery. He's written a book An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, which I haven't read. But I am living what he's talking about, so with that let me write a few things.

In the NPR piece the situation is described thusly.

Up until the Industrial Revolution humans did most things on a small scale. A few people running a farm, or running a mill, etc. These were very human scaled organizations, he claims.

Then the Industrial Revolution happened and suddenly the scale of organizations had to expand dramatically. A cost effective factory for that time was huge, and employed thousands of people. To go along with it was the rise of huge corporations.

But, today, technology has come full circle to being able to enable individuals to work on small scale organizations.

An example is what I do with my web sites. I have a "day job" in a large corporation, but I also am a web site publisher and earn a tidy side income at that. Additionally I see a way to totally divorce myself from the large corporation, and instead operate several small operations each of which would provide part of my income.

In the interview they gave some more examples.

For example all the people making a living (partial or not) via sales through eBay.COM. He exemplified eBay as a wave of future business style. Another example was someone making custom guitars at home, and he uses eMachineShop.com for parts production.

The way eBay makes their money is through taking advantage of others doing what they want to do. This is drastically different from the large corporate style organization, where the organization exists to tell thousands of people what to do. There are dozens of companies making money through enabling others to do what they want. Google, for example, makes a lot of money from individuals like me who run AdSense advertising on their web sites.

I think, though, he's selling a bit of a pipe dream.

These individuals making their small organizations are riding on the back of some very large organizations. An individual selling stuff through eBay is absolutely dependant on eBay, as well as the package delivery industry (FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc). These are all very large companies who operate in the top-down style of telling their employees what to do.

Let's take another example. Suppose you have a great salsa recipe and you want to make and sell salsa. Go to any farmers market and you'll find several people living a similar dream. It's relatively simple, you need to pass health inspections, be able to operate a healthy kitchen and production facility, find FDA certified packaging, get a FDA certified label made showing the ingredients, etc. One could launch a salsa business with a small group of people, and then go to farmers markets or local Whole Foods stores to sell your product. If you keep working at it, you might eventually have national distribution and so on.

But, let's get back to the beginning. Where does your packaging come from? Are you going to make the packaging, or are you going to buy that? How big is the company who makes the packaging? Where do you buy the ingredients? The local farmer, or from an agribusiness?

What I'm getting at is that this utopia Glenn Reynolds holds out in front of us won't be there for all of us. Some of us will have to work in large organizations like UPS so that others of us can run our humanely-sized home businesses. And that's probably okay, because not everybody is inspired to do this. Many people seem content to go to work and be told what to do with their lives. If that's what they want to do, then more power to them.

Our right to privacy, killed by the Bush administration? Or was it inevitable?

It's easy to lay the blame for loss of privacy on the Bush Administration. It is while the Bush Administration was in power when massive privacy invasion by the government was disclosed. While I'm quick to lay blame on the Bush Administration, in this case there's a heavy dose of inevitablity.

Let's consider these articles which make an interesting juxtaposition.

No longer can the right of privacy be expected in any walk of life -- an editorial in a local newspaper in Hagerstown Maryland.

Invasion of privacy must stop -- An editorial in a local newspaper in India

Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data - A New York Times article by John Markoff

The first two take the opinion that we have a "right to privacy". As the Hagerstown editorial mentions, a right to privacy wasn't written into the U.S. Constitution, but that was because the Founders assumed privacy was such an obvious right as "breathing" or "eating" that they didn't bother to discuss it. But little did they have a clue of the sort of technology which would be developed.

The article from India is interesting because of the expression of fear which comes up just with a hint that any of our phone conversations could be tapped.

The NY Times article just demonstrates how the government is continuing to look for more and more surveillance and privacy-destroying tools. It discusses an NSA visit to Silicon Valley looking for data mining tools. Which just makes me think of the Total Information Awareness project.

Data mining is widely used by corporations. For example credit card companies data-mine transactions looking for possibly fraudulent activity. In the article they discuss a prison which used data mining of telephone call records to discover a drug smuggling ring.

The point is technology creates new possibilities. The digitization of "everything" makes privacy invasion so much easier to do. Which gets to the inevitability.

Even if it's inevitable, that doesn't mean "we the people" should just allow it to happen without protest.

Asia Times Online :: India to join Turkmenistan gas pipeline

Hopefully you saw Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie by Michael Moore that was prominent in 2004. His main topic throughout the movie was to explore cronyism and how that created the war in Iraq. The main example is the laundry list of business ties between the Administration, the Saudi royalty and even to the bin Laden family. That most of the Administration has ties to the Oil Industry (both GW and GHW Bush owned oil companies, VP Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, Chevron named an oil tanker for Condoleeza Rice, etc) figured heavily in this movie.

In one segment Moore talked about the oil in Central Asia and the U.S. plan for bringing that oil to market. The Central Asia oil has been a matter of power play for several years, and it's land-locked position that isn't easily accessible makes it difficult to "extract" and sell on the market. Taking it in one direction, you'd be going through Russia. Another direction and you're going across Siberia and then the port is in the arctic and probably locked in by ice. And to the south are steep mountains, some of the highest in the world. Also to the south is Iran, a sworn enemy of the U.S.

The chosen U.S. route was through Afghanistan. The U.S. has pushed for this route since the 1990's. The problem was, neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan were terribly friendly to the U.S. The Taliban was in control, and Pakistan was very friendly with the Taliban. It didn't make any difference that during the 1980's the U.S. worked closely with Pakistan and the people who became the Taliban. In the 1980's the menace was Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, and the U.S. effort to drive Russia out, which meant a secret operation supplying the mujahadeen (as they were known then) with arms and training. By the 1990's that was long in the past, and U.S. policy had shifted away. Even so the Taliban government visited the U.S., as Michael Moore documented, working to negotiate both the opium poppy eradication as well as the pipeline deal.

BTW, since the toppling of the Taliban government, opium poppy production has sprung back to pre-Taliban levels.

In any case there was an existing plan to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. And you can imagine the big question in U.S. and oil industry planning -- how the heck do we get access to Afghanistan? Essentially that country had become enemy territory.

Conveniently the September 11, 2001 attack provided the needed excuse. The culprits were in Afghanistan, which gave us all the excuse in the world to invade that country, topple its government, etc.

And, now, conveniently the path was clear. Afghanistan was no longer essentially enemy territory. Further, in the process of making war on Afghanistan the U.S. established bases and cooperation with several Central Asian countries. These countries had been carved out of the former Soviet Union after its collapse in the early 1990's.

A nagging question is whether the September 11, 2001 attack was merely a coincidence, or whether some behind the scenes conspiracy created it? There's enough connections there to make one ponder. The Bush family had ties with the bin Laden family, to the point that one of the bin Laden cousins bailed George W Bush out of at least one of his failed businesses. And there was the pre-existing plan for a pipeline through Afghanistan, and coincidentally the major players in creating that plan are now major players in both the Afghanistan government and the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan.

But there isn't enough proven data to truly connect the attack to any behind the scenes conspiracy. So we'll just leave that question dangling out there.

What's of interest now is this article: India to join Turkmenistan gas pipeline

It discusses two different pipeline projects to bring Natural Gas to "market". One is the US-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) while the other is the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI).

This appears to be part of the larger geopolitics power struggle. The different sources of these two pipelines is interesting. Iran being an U.S. enemy at this moment makes this statement interesting:

Moreover, unlike IPI, the project does not run the risk of being blacklisted for participation by US and European financiers and companies. The US has been encouraging Pakistan to abandon the IPI project and consider TAP for meeting its gas needs.

Blacklisted?? This isn't explained, but clearly the official relationship with Iran is problematic for many countries. But Pakistan probably has a lot of cooperation with Iran, given they share a long border and probably have common cultural elements. But to the U.S. and the "west" Iran is a pariah, being controlled by fundamentalists who are opposed to the western powers.

Chavez threatens to cut off oil to U.S. - Feb 18, 2006

This CNN article: Chavez threatens to cut off oil to U.S. discusses a threat by Hugo Chavez to cut off Venezuela's shipments of oil to the U.S. Part of this has been an ongoing story, for example the American-backed coup attempt in Venezuela a couple years ago.

Chavez has been making statements for years about vague threats against him by the U.S. They might sound like the ravings of paranoia, except that there was this weird coup which started to topple him out of power. A coup which was clearly inspired by American interests. And, there is the long history of the U.S. toppling governments in the Western Hemisphere through following the Monroe Doctrine, in which President Monroe declared to the world, "The Western Hemisphere is ours, and you can't have it" and which has justified repeated actions by the U.S. government against western hemisphere governments from at least the Dominican Republic, to Allende's government in Chile, to the invasions of Grenada and Panama.

A part of the game playing between the U.S. and Venezuela is repeated expulsions of diplomats over allegations of spying.

Which just reminds me of: The confessions of an economic hit-man an interview I heard on Democracy Now a few days ago. The interviewee, John Perkins, had written a book exposing, as a former insider to the game, how the U.S. government has quietly created a worldwide economic empire. A part of that game is to make deals with world leaders where people like him would meet newly elected world leaders and offer them a deal. In one hand the economic hit man will offer riches, kickbacks for example from the sale of whatever resources that country has. In the other hand the economic hit man will hold a threat of violence against that leader or his/her family. These leaders know the history and know that legions of previous world leaders have been assassinated or overthrown by these people.

Cool Tool: 1491

Cool Tool: 1491 -- What happened to the native peoples of this land after Europeans arrived can only be described as genocide and ethnic cleansing. There were advanced civilizations, cities, culture, everything. All wiped out because of the arrival of Europeans. Some of it was accidental, due to diseases the Europeans carried for which the native peoples did not have biological immunity. But in many cases it was ruthless cold-blooded murder.

1491 : New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Amazon.com

1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans. For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.

Mann is well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. --Tom Nissley

A 1491 Timeline

Europe and Asia	Dates	The Americas
	25000-35000 B.C.	Time of paleo-Indian migration to Americas from Siberia, according to genetic evidence. Groups likely traveled across the Pacific in boats.
Wheat and barley grown from wild ancestors in Sumer.	6000
	5000	In what many scientists regard as humankind's first and greatest feat of genetic engineering, Indians in southern Mexico systematically breed maize (corn) from dissimilar ancestor species.
First cities established in Sumer.	4000
	3000	The Americas' first urban complex, in coastal Peru, of at least 30 closely packed cities, each centered around large pyramid-like structures
Great Pyramid at Giza	2650
	32	First clear evidence of Olmec use of zero--an invention, widely described as the most important mathematical discovery ever made, which did not occur in Eurasia until about 600 A.D., in India (zero was not introduced to Europe until the 1200s and not widely used until the 1700s)
	800-840 A.D.	Sudden collapse of most central Maya cities in the face of severe drought and lengthy war
Vikings briefly establish first European settlements in North America.	1000	Reconstruction of Cahokia, c. 1250 A.D.* Abrupt rise of Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the largest city north of the Rio Grande. Population estimates vary from at least 15,000 to 100,000.
Black Death devastates Europe.	1347-1351
	1398	Birth of Tlacaélel, the brilliant Mexican strategist behind the Triple Alliance (also known as the Aztec empire), which within decades controls central Mexico, then the most densely settled place on Earth.
The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.	1492	The Encounter: Columbus sails from Europe to the Caribbean.
Syphilis apparently brought to Europe by Columbus's returning crew.	1493
Ferdinand Magellan departs from Spain on around-the-world voyage.	1519	Sixteenth-century Mexica drawing of the effects of smallpox** Cortes driven from Tenochtitlán, capital of the Triple Alliance, and then gains victory as smallpox, a European disease never before seen in the Americas, kills at least one of three in the empire.
	1525-1533	The smallpox epidemic sweeps into Peru, killing as much as half the population of the Inka empire and opening the door to conquest by Spanish forces led by Pizarro.
	1617	Huge areas of New England nearly depopulated by epidemic brought by shipwrecked French sailors.
English Pilgrims arrive at Patuxet, an Indian village emptied by disease, and survive on stored Indian food, renaming the village Plymouth.	1620

*Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Ill., painting by Michael Hampshire. **Courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, N.M. (Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1547-77).

More leaked memo's in Britain

There's a new set of memo's leaked in the British press currently. This is on top of the prior memo, leaked during the recent election campaign.

The new set of memo's provide more ammunition to my prior writings on this subject. The memo's show the political calculations going around the British government in the Summer of 2002, leading up to a meeting between Bush and Blair at Bush's Crawford TX "ranch". It shows in more detail the concerns that the evidence was weak, and that they would have to manipulate the public in order to get the war going. Finally, it shows that in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attack, the push was to topple Iraq's government, regardless of any other consideration.

My previous writings on this issue are:

• Visibility building on Bush war memo: Congress finally saying the ‘I’ word
• Bush asked to explain UK war memo
• Bush/Blair planned Iraq invasion in July 2002

The Associated Press has the memo's online here:

• Iraq: Legal Background
• Prime Minister: Your Trip to the U.S.
• Iraq and Afghanistan: A Conversation with Wolfowitz
• Iraq: Options Papers
• Iraq: Advice for the prime minister
• Crawford/Iraq
• Iraq: Conditions for Military Action
• Iraq: Prime Minister's Meeting, 23 July

And the Associated Press has published this overview: Newly leaked memos add to debate on war motives Blair aide noted concern on US rush to invade (By Thomas Wagner, Associated Press | June 19, 2005)

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/ also has the memo's, and is tracking the story.

Afghanistan wrangling

Harmid Karzai is coming to Washington DC to visit. It seems there's a major disagreement brewing.

Just prior a news report was leaked through Newsweek of desecration of the Koran by U.S. Soldiers at Guantanamo who are guarding the prisoners captured in Afghanistan. (Hmm... it's now 2005, these prisoners were captured in 2001, transferred to Cuba in 2002, so just how long are they going to be kept without trial?) The news has sparked rioting all through the Islamic world, most especially in Afghanistan.

Karzai is hopping mad: Karzai shock at US Afghan 'abuse' (Saturday, 21 May, 2005, BBC.CO.UK)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has demanded action from the US after new details emerged of alleged abuse of prisoners by US troops in Afghanistan.

Mr Karzai said he was shocked and would raise the issue with President George W Bush when he meets him next week.

This isn't just about the Koran desecration, but also abuse of prisoners at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Unlike the previous prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, this time the senior officials are being implicated. At Abu Ghraib the senior officials were likely involved, but somehow escaped from being accused.

Report implicates top brass in Bagram scandal (Julian Borger in Washington, Saturday May 21, 2005, The Guardian )

A leaked report on a military investigation into two killings of detainees at a US prison in Afghanistan has produced new evidence of connivance of senior officers in systematic prisoner abuse.

The investigation shows the military intelligence officers in charge of the detention centre at Bagram airport were redeployed to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003, while still under investigation for the deaths of two detainees months earlier. Despite military prosecutors' recommendations, the officers involved have yet to be charged.

Afghan prisoners were 'tortured to death' by American guards (By Justin Huggler, Asia Correspondent, 21 May 2005, The Independant of London)

A 2,000-page report on an internal investigation by the US military leaked to The New York Times and published yesterday provides exhaustive detail on how the two were kept chained in excruciating positions and kicked to death.

The harrowing stories of the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar told in the report could prove as damaging to the US as the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

The report reveals that Dilawar, a taxi driver, died despite the fact that most of the interrogators were convinced he was innocent.

US abuse of Afghan prisoners 'widespread' (Sarah Left and agencies, Friday May 20, 2005 )

US soldiers carried out widespread abuse of detainees at the US-run Bagram prison camp in Afghanistan, according to a confidential US army report revealed today in the New York Times.

Seven soldiers have been charged in connection with abuse at Bagram, where the paper reports that harsh treatment by some interrogators was routine, prisoners were shackled in painful fixed positions, and guards could strike shackled detainees with virtual impunity.

The army document highlights the deaths in detention of Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver who most interrogators had believed to be innocent, and another inmate, Habibullah. The two men died within six days of each other in December 2002.

Interesting the U.S. government is throwing some accusations at Karzai. Apparently he hasn't been showing enough "leadership" at Opium eradication. War on Drugs, meet War on Terror, Terror, meet Drugs.

Report: Karzai faulted over Afghan heroin Ties tested ahead of Afghan leader’s visit to Washington (MSNBC News Services, Updated: 5:34 a.m. ET May 22, 2005)

U.S. officials said in a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this month that a poppy eradication program aimed at Afghanistan’s heroin trade was ineffective partly because of President Hamid Karzai’s leadership, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions.

The May 13 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to Rice, shown to the Times by an official said to be alarmed at the slow pace of poppy eradication, said provincial officials and village elders impeded destruction of poppy acreage. It also said top Afghan officials, including Karzai, had done little to counter that.

... “Karzai has been well aware of the difficulty in trying to implement an effective ground eradication program, (but) he has been unwilling to assert strong leadership, even in his own province of Kandahar,

More Real ID

Identity crisis
Congress just passed an act requiring Americans to carry a national I.D. card. Forget the Big Brother concerns -- security experts say terrorists will figure out how to get them, and warn that your DMV experience will become even more hellish. (By Farhad Manjoo, SALON.COM, May 13, 2005)

The article is an overview of the Real ID act, and the various protestations against it. The Schneier bit is just one of the interviewees quoted in the article.

To recap - the Real ID act calls for the formation of a national identification card that's machine readable. It will piggyback on drivers licenses, hence the implementation requirement will be passed on to individual states.

Farhad's article is very interesting, even with a couple innacuracies. For example he claims the U.S. Passports already have RFID in them, while linking to this article. But if he had bothered to read the article, as well as the background material linked from the article, he'd know there was a proposal to add RFID to U.S. passports, but that the proposal was recently rejected.

The key concern is the RFID chip, and Farhad seems to position that chip as nothing short of the Mark Of The Beast in the Book of Revelations.

Hundreds of immigration rights and civil-liberties groups have criticized the bill. They argue that the national I.D. card will allow cops and corporations to spy on citizens and worry that new databases of personal information will aid identity thieves.

The most potent argument he makes is demanding solid identity cards is like looking in the rear view mirror and fixing the problem that just occurred. It's like this nonsense we go through at the airports, just because one guy made a half-assed attempt to blow up an airplane with bomb material in his shoes, we now all have to take off our shoes in the airport.

the "failure of imagination," to borrow the 9/11 Commission's phrase. Depending on whom you ask, the act will cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. By focusing our resources on a plan to prevent a repeat of 9/11, we may be failing to anticipate and prevent a different attack -- one in which the attackers aren't foreigners but American citizens, whose weapons aren't airplanes but buses, and whose target isn't an office building but a shopping mall.

The act is not worth the trade-off ... We get no additional security while expending enormous costs to institute the national I.D. system. The cost is measured not only in money but also in the loss of privacy.

The big thing we should worry about with this is the ways it can be misused. For example passive RFID can be read from a distance, using a powerful enough reader. For example an argument could be made for installing readers in every doorway leading in and out of public buildings, or perhaps all buildings. In order for the Real ID card to work, the RFID reader has to query a central database to determine the identity associated with the card, and hence the owners of that central database then would be able to track every Real ID holder and most of their movements. An argument could be made to require Real ID for any purchase in any store, just as today we're asked to show a "picture ID" when we buy something with a credit card or check. And, again, the owners of the central identity database would be able to track where we purchase items.

The Real I.D. Act will result in the creation of a nationwide database of personal information that would be a juicy target for attackers. "There isn't a database on the planet that isn't vulnerable to attack," says Schneier, an expert on database security. "Maybe they'll manage to create the first safe database -- but that isn't the way to bet."

Yup ... I've been working in computer software for over 20 years, and I have to totally agree with this. It's not just the database, though, but the whole system. With RFID scanners installed ubiquitously some of them will fall into mischevious hands, be reverse engineered, and they'll find a way to get into the system.

They might insert false identities into the system .. might tamper with things .. or it could end up being a huge leak of private information.

Plus, if you've ever looked at your own credit report, you know how completely innacurate those are. The credit reporting companies have a big incentive for accurate reports, and they still get them wrong.

On Dec. 14, 1999, Ahmed Ressam, a 28-year-old Algerian man who had obtained a legitimate Canadian passport under the name Benni Noris, attempted to cross from Victoria, B.C., to Port Angeles, Wash. Customs agents ran his passport -- an old-style passport that wasn't machine readable -- through the computer and found nothing odd. But something about Ressam's demeanor didn't sit well with the agents in Port Angeles, so they began searching his car. They found 100 pounds of nitroglycerin explosives stashed in his trunk. He had planned to blow up LAX.

This system could lull us with a false sense of security that could allow people like that to slip buy security guards who aren't being alert because the machines tell them who everybody is.

The elite's plan to reshape the world, one disaster at a time

There's a recurring claim various people make of a global "conspiracy" to keep control of the world by the money'd elites. For example you can look at the current U.S. administration and see the hands of the money'd elites, from GW Bush whose family made their reputation from doing whatever the money'd elites want them to do, to the rest of them.

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (By Naomi Klein, The Nation. Posted April 18, 2005. ALTERNET.ORG)

This article talks about one leg of that story. It's about what has been happening with each new nation-building exercise that follows some disaster or war. Think back over the years and you have several examples, the parts of the former Yugoslavia, Ruwanda, Angola, Somalia, and now Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Sri Lanka, or Aceh, etc.

Few ideologues can resist the allure of a blank slate--that was colonialism's seductive promise: "discovering" wide-open new lands where utopia seemed possible. But colonialism is dead, or so we are told; there are no new places to discover, no terra nullius (there never was), no more blank pages on which, as Mao once said, "the newest and most beautiful words can be written." There is, however, plenty of destruction--countries smashed to rubble, whether by so-called Acts of God or by Acts of Bush (on orders from God). And where there is destruction there is reconstruction, a chance to grab hold of "the terrible barrenness," as a UN official recently described the devastation in Aceh, and fill it with the most perfect, beautiful plans.

"We used to have vulgar colonialism," says Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher with Focus on the Global South. "Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it 'reconstruction.'"

In the wake of every disaster (or war) you have waves of "help" arriving. The help arrives in the hands of the usual suspects in the NGO community. But along with the help comes ideology. The blank slate phenemona means they can force the local government, if it survived whatever the disaster befell them, to radically change their governance towards the moderate pseudo-democracy preferred by the money'd elites. Further, they'll force a reshaping of the economy to support the market-driven model preferred by the money'd elites.

Or from Sri Lanka, where 600,000 people who lost their homes in the tsunami are still languishing in temporary camps. One hundred days after the giant waves hit, Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri Lanka, sent out a desperate e-mail to colleagues around the world. "The funds received for the benefit of the victims are directed to the benefit of the privileged few, not to the real victims," he wrote. "Our voices are not heard and not allowed to be voiced."

... the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them. Kumara, in another e-mail, warns that Sri Lanka is now facing "a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarization," potentially even more devastating than the first. "We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US Marines."

What of the preferences of the local people? What of the historical reasons they might have for the governance system that people have put into place?

It seems that, in 2004, the Bush Administration stepped it up a notch.

On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries "at the same time," each lasting "five to seven years."

So, I guess it's official. The U.S. government is being used as a tool by the money'd elites to reshape the world to serve their purposes. They're using the cover of disasters around the world, ones which their news teams conveniently beat up a frenzy of concern and calls for the government to "do something", and along the way of helping they force "reform".

Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties

"Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties" is a new movie sponsored by Robert Greenwald. This time the director is Nonny de la Pena.

"We created Unconstitutional to show Americans the extent to which our civil liberties and our freedoms have been trampled upon by our government since 9/11," said Robert Greenwald, the film's executive producer. "The more Americans understand what is at stake, and what has already been lost, the more determined we become to protect our rights."

Website: http://UnconstitutionalTheMovie.org/

AASIN: 

Unconstitutional - The War On Our Civil Liberties

The disappearing traditional ways

All around the world traditional indigineous cultures are disappearing as fast as you can say Coca Cola or McDonalds. What are we losing to this "progress"?

The salt-men of Tibet

In the upper reaches of Nepal, and in Tibet, there is a culture of people who make their living by mining salt from various lakes around Tibet. Salt doesn't naturally occur in the diet of the Himalayan peoples, because they are so far from the ocean. So over the millenia of living on this land, they have developed a full set of traditions and activities surrounding the harvesting of salt, and commerce to trade the salt with other peoples who can grow grain.

With the encroaching modernity, these traditional ways are disappearing. I have found a couple resources that show some bits of these peoples lives.

The Caravans of the Himalayas: This book is a glossy coffee table style book published by the National Geographic Society. It is an intimate portrait of the lives of these Himalayan tribes. The book covers far more than the salt gathering trip, but their year-round lifestyle.

Life at this altitude is very hard. It is well above the treeline, and the vast majority of plants that grow is the grass the yak's feed on. Everything circles around the yak herds, feeing them, sheltering them, using them for food and clothing, and more. The altitude is high, the food scanty, the weather cold, the work is hard, yet these are the peoples who developed spiritual traditions of such great depth as to inspire the whole world to spiritual exploration and the journey to enlightenment.

The Saltmen of Tibet: This DVD is an intimate portrait specifically of the trip to gather salt. All the words and singing are by the tribal people speaking in their native language, subtitled all the way.

The movie begins with the preparations at home. Making and repairing ropes. Gathering the salt gathering crew and animals. Collecting and repairing the tools. The consideration of which person in the crew will take what role on the journey.

Then as the men, for women do not take this trip, set off we learn that it is a month-long journey just to get to the salt lakes. Rituals abound around this journey, from various superstitions over why the salt availability varies from year to year, to a special language that is spoken only after a specific point in the journey. It is a month long journey of daily herding the 160 yak's, pitching tents, cooking meals, drinking tea, and more.

We members of modern societies have to honor our ancestors, for we can see that life was very hard for everyone, and that it wasn't all that long ago when everything was done manually in the nature we see in this movie. Without the work of our ancestors, we would not be here today.

Interspersed with scenes of the men gathering salt by hand, is scenes of lorries gathering salt. Everybody needs the salt, and in the modern eye one thinks "does it matter how the thing is done?" and "does it only matter what the result is?". That is, salt is salt isn't it? Or is it?

We see in the salt men's style of gathering a great reverence for the earth, and the task of gathering the salt, and great thankfulness for the salt lake in providing their gift of salt. Truly, the salt they are gathering literally means life (or death) for them, because without the salt their bodies would not function. As they gathered the salt, songs and prayers of thankfulness were sung. As they finished the salt gathering task, special rituals and prayers were done. Also yak figurines were left as an offering to the Goddess who watches over the lake.

Is salt that means life, salt that is gathered with such great reverence, is that just any old salt?

And, what if the earth, our planet, really does respond to such reverential prayer? Do you think me mad for suggesting this? Well, consider what is being learned scientifically about the power of prayer. The many scientific studies of prayer for the sick show that prayer and other forms of spiritual healing have a positive effect on those who are prayed for. It's not too farfetched, then, to consider that other things, when prayed for, also benefit from the prayer.

It is interesting how every indigenous society holds great reverence for the earth, and directly prays for the health and wellbeing of the earth. Do they know something that we, with our jet airplanes, have forgotten? I pray that we remember before it becomes too late.

DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

IAO Mission:  The DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO) will imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making.

IAO Vision:  The most serious asymmetric threat facing the United States is terrorism, a threat characterized by collections of people loosely organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to identify and define.  IAO plans to develop technology that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks, their plans, and potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats.  To effectively and efficiently carry this out, we must promote sharing, collaborating and reasoning to convert nebulous data to knowledge and actionable options.

This is at once a nightmare directly from the worst conspiracy theories, U.S. Government policy, and a top secret research project. It is clear the projects sponsored by this office have been ongoing for a long time as many of the projects listed are described as continuation of prior projects. Everything is presented as if it's non-finished research, that has not been turned into operational systems or devices. But, at the same time, reading between the lines, it indicates some forms of these capabilities already exist.

It's important to remember that, while they say over and over this is meant to find "foreign terroists" it's merely a matter of choice to apply this to anybody. Today the target is "foreign terrorists" but suppose that tomorrow the target becomes "Mexican Americans" because so many of them are here illegally. Remember what happened to Japanese Americans during world war II (when many were detained in the American version of Concentration Camps).

All the information on this page was captured from the IAO website on November 15, 2002.

What's on this page:

• Resources

• Projects

• Admiral Poindexter

• Decoding Terminology

Resources

• TIA Project Home page [darpa.mil/iao/index.htm]

• After the big flap, the IAO office a) changed their logo to be less secret-society-like, and b) expunged some things from the site such as the BIO's of the lead people. Richard M. Smith [computerbytesman.com/] captured the missing pages out of the Google cache, and saved them on a web site. I have captured his pages into a PDF file here.

• Total Information Awareness Giftshop Buy a thong for freedom! [cafeshops.com/totalawareness]

• Federal Bisuness Opportunities [fedbizopps.gov/], opportunity BAA-02-08 is at [eps.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/BAA02-08/listing.html]

• EPIC information page on TIA [epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/]

• EPIC Analysis of Total Information Awareness Contractor Documents [epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/doc_analysis.html]

• NY Times

• March 10, 2003 [nytimes.com/2003/03/11/business/11PRIV.html] Software Pioneer Quits Board of Groove Mitchell D. Kapor,.., has resigned from the board of Groove Networks after learning that the company's software was being used by the Pentagon as part of its development of a domestic surveillance system. ... a person close to Mr. Kapor said that he was uncomfortable with the fact that Groove Networks' desktop collaboration software was a crucial component of the antiterrorist surveillance software being tested at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Information Awareness Office ... The project has generated controversy since it was started early last year by Admiral Poindexter,..,whose felony conviction as part of the Iran-contra scandal was reversed because of a Congressional grant of immunity. ... The project has been trying to build a prototype computer system that would permit the scanning of hundreds or thousands of databases to look for information patterns that might alert the authorities to the activities of potential terrorists. ... "Mitch cares very much about the social impact of technology," said Shari Steele, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.. "It's the reason he founded E.F.F.," she said. ... On Feb. 11, House and Senate negotiators agreed that the Total Information Awareness project could not be used against Americans. Congress also agreed to restrict additional research on the program without extensive consultation with Congress. ... President Bush can keep the research alive by certifying to Congress that a halt "would endanger the national security of the United States."

• no-registration-required-link: archives.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/business/11PRIV.html

• Groove Networks home page [groove.net/] And, sure enough, there's a soldier in uniform on the front, sitting in front of a laptop computer, talking through a cell phone. Software features include

• Collaboration, "Shared Spaces", joint file editing, messaging.

• The laws & agreements detailed in the article are listed at the EPIC information page (above).

• Washington Post

• editorial, November 16, 2002 [washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61653-2002Nov15.html]

• article November 15, 2002 [washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58490-2002Nov15.html]

• C|NET News

• Reuters article, March 4, 2003 [news.com.com/2100-1028-991058.html?tag=fd_top] U.S., software maker craft Arabic tool The article details the difficulty in understanding Arabic writings ("The grammar of Arabic makes it difficult to distinguish words because of the way that word spellings change for conjugation and pronouns"). Basis Technology is the company in question, and their software can deal with understanding Arabic writing given all these linguistic difficulties. While not directly stated, this technology fits exactly in the various automatic language translation projects (Babylon, EARS and TIDES) listed below.

• Basis Technology [basistech.com/] They have "Language Analysis" software for many languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German and Arabic) and the Arabic version is said to have been created "in response to the needs of the U.S. Intelligence Community".

• Their press release for the Arabic Language software. [basistech.com/news/press-releases/2003/arla-030304.html]

• The Register:

• March 3, 2003 [theregister.co.uk/content/4/29530.html] Total Poindexter Awareness tech spooks - a Who's Who

• November 14, 2002 [theregister.co.uk/content/6/28107.html] US gov's 'ultimate database' run by a felon

• Salon.COM

• January 29, 2003 Total Information Awareness: Down, but not out [salon.com/tech/feature/2003/01/29/tia_privacy/] Congress may have put the brakes on the most ambitious government surveillance program ever. But for citizens worried about their privacy, TIA still means trouble.

• International Herald-Tribune November 13, 2002 [iht.com/articles/76751.html]

• Conspiracy Archive July 22, 2002 [conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/Paranoid.htm]

• Federation of American Scientists [fas.org/ fas.org/irp/agency/dod/poindexter.html] This page reprints a speech given by Admiral Poindexter in August 2002 outlining the vision and plans for the Total Information Awareness system.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation [eff.org/ eff.org/Privacy/TIA/] Their information page.

• Funding for TIA All But Dead [yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/07/14/1836247.shtml?tid=103&tid=158&tid=99; referring to a Wired News article at wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59606,00.html] Apparently the uproar over the original unveiling of this project caused Congress to balk and force changes, and now the funding is pretty much dead. Of course that rarely stops the forward progression of Big Brother, and they'll simply find another project name to file it under (witness the series of names the Star Wars project has gone under).

• Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) [darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm]: This is the initial morphing of the project as mentioned in the previous item.

Projects

This DARPA research project has a very wide and in-depth scope of massive proportions. Overall the effect is to create something akin to a "search engine" and to apply it to the whole "information space" available around the planet. The information space space covered by the project is not just what's on the Internet, but business transactions, biometric identification (via face-recognition) of people walking through public spaces, automatic speech recognition and language translation of captured telecommunications traffic, searching for "potential terrorists" and preventing "potential attacks", and more. In other words, they are working to create the technology and means to monitor pretty much everything happening around the planet, and to sift through the mass quantities of data looking for patterns indicating threats. The purpose is to identify possible threats, and have a better ability to choose from a variety of response options.

Map of the projects, links to project home pages, and goal statements quoted from their pages:

Program	Their mission statement and goals	My translation
Total Information Awareness (TIA) System	The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists – and decipher their plans – and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts.  To that end, the TIA program objective is to create a counter-terrorism information system that: (1) increases information coverage by an order of magnitude, and affords easy future scaling; (2) provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed; (3) can automatically queue analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks; and, (4) supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and prospective courses of action.	Automatically sift through the "information space" looking for patterns of interesting activity. It is expected to notice these patterns of interesting activity within an hour. This could be anything happening within the "information space", or in other words, anything happening around the world. For example, a pattern to look for could be bank activity in certain bank accounts, coupled with telephone calls to certain phone numbers, purchases of airline tickets, and purchases of certain chemicals; a pattern indicating a possible attack on an airliner by sneaking aboard a canister of nerve gas, releasing it in mid-flight killing all aboard, leaving a derelict rogue airplane flying uncontrolled until it runs out of fuel and crashes somewhere random. The phrase "automatically queue analysts" suggests that the computer systems will be constantly scanning, and when something is detected it will send a notice to Military Intelligence Analysts. The military analysts would have a "job queue" and when each analyst finishes one task, another task could be waiting in their queue. This is no doubt similar to "call center" systems, of the type used for customer service centers in large corporations that field large quantities of customer requests. In such a system, when you call the customer service phone number, your call is placed in a queue and your call is answered by the first available customer service agent.
Babylon	The goal of the Babylon program is to develop rapid, two-way, natural language speech translation interfaces and platforms for the warfighter for use in field environments for force protection, refugee processing, and medical triage. Babylon will focus on overcoming the many technical and engineering challenges limiting current multilingual translation technology to enable future full-domain, unconstrained dialog translation in multiple environments.	This appears to be the same as the pocket translator devices widely used by international travellers. The unit pictured has the typical high-impact-resistant design of military devices. The page mentions "The Babylon program will focus on low-population, high-terrorist-risk languages that will not be supported by any commercial enterprise.  Mandarin and Arabic were selected based on immediate and intermediate needs." acknowledging that this kind of device exists for "popular languages" (for example, Japanese/English) but not the unpopular ones. Imagine the typical "Grunt" going into a foreign country. How will they communicate? This is it. What's interesting is to contrast this with the EARS program before. The need is the same, instant information translation between a variety of languages, it is only the application that's different.
Bio-Surveillance	The goal of the Bio-Surveillance program is to develop the necessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches.  The key to mitigating a biological attack is early detection.  Given the availability of appropriate medications, as many as half the expected casualties could be prevented if an attack is detected only a few days earlier than it would have otherwise been identified.   For contagious biological agents, early detection is also clearly paramount.  The Bio-Surveillance program will dramatically increase DoD's ability to detect a clandestine biological warfare attack in time to respond effectively and so avoid potentially thousands of casualties.	As it says, they desire devices which can automatically detect biological attacks. Many biological agents are odorless, tasteless, etc, and given the long incubation period could cause widespread infection before being detected. If we recall the anthrax incidents in the Fall of 2001, the initial days were full of confusion over the nature of the incident, where the anthrax came from, and so forth. The detection period shown in the picture is over a period of days. With current devices it is 4-8 days requred, and they desire decreasing the period to 1-3 days.
Communicator	The specific goal of the Communicator program is to develop and demonstrate “dialogue interaction” technology that enables warfighters to talk with computers, such that information will be accessible on the battlefield or in command centers without ever having to touch a keyboard. The Communicator Platform will be wireless and mobile, and will function in a networked environment. Software enabling dialogue interaction will automatically focus on the context of a dialogue to improve performance, and the system will be capable of automatically adapting to new topics so conversation is natural and efficient.	This is to make interaction with battlefield computer devices more fluid. You can imagine the chaos in most battlefield situations, and how computer keyboards would be difficult to use. You want something to talk to, just like they have in the movies.
Effective, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-Text (EARS)	The Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-To-Text (EARS) program is developing speech-to-text (automatic transcription) technology whose output is substantially richer and much more accurate than currently possible. This will make it possible for machines to do a much better job of detecting, extracting, summarizing, and translating important information. It will also enable humans to understand what was said by reading transcripts instead of listening to audio signals.	The picture associated with this shows a communication tower, radio signals, going to "Rich Transcription", and becoming a transcript. This is tieing speech-to-text conversion (speech recognition technology, and conversion to written language) to automated language translation. The source of the speech being recognized, and then translated, is likely any telecommunication means (broadcast radio & TV, satellite phones, cellular phones, landlines, etc). The capability would exist to, for example, tap into a radio broadcast, and regardless of what the language being spoken, to convert the spoken speech to written text, and then translate that written text into whatever language the military analyst speaks (presumably English). Also see TIDES below and Babylon above.
Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD)	The goal of the Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) program is development of technologies and tools for automated discovery, extraction and linking of sparse evidence contained in large amounts of classified and unclassified data sources.  EELD is developing detection capabilities to extract relevant data and relationships about people, organizations, and activities from message traffic and open source data.  It will link items relating potential terrorist groups or scenarios, and learn patterns of different groups or scenarios to identify new organizations or emerging threats.	Consider again the "information space" concept. The system proposed here is able to suck in vast quantities of data. What they want to look for is threads of data scattered around the cloud of all available information. Think about the data leading to the people leading the September 11, 2001 attacks. They bought one-way airplane tickets using cash, an event which could stand out on its own because most people buy round-trip tickets using credit cards. This might be innocent, but when 5 people on the same flight all buy one-way airplane tickets using cash you begin to wonder. Then if you notice that on three other flights there are five people on each flight buying one-way airplane tickets using cash, it raises the interest of this activity. The next step, you look at who these people are, and any prior knowledge of them, and you might find some of them know each other, some have been enrolled in flight training schools, have stayed at the same hotels at the same times as others, etc. By this time of tieing these pieces of data together, the potential threat level should be pretty high.
FutureMap	The DARPA FutureMAP (Futures Markets Applied to Prediction) program is a follow-up to a current DARPA SBIR, Electronic Market-Based Decision Support (SB012-012).  FutureMAP will concentrate on market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events. Strategic decisions depend upon the accurate assessment of the likelihood of future events.  This analysis often requires independent contributions by experts in a wide variety of fields, with the resulting difficulty of combining the various opinions into one assessment.  Market-based techniques provide a tool for producing these assessments. There is potential for application of market-based methods to analyses of interest to the DoD.  These may include analysis of political stability in regions of the world, prediction of the timing and impact on national security of emerging technologies, analysis of the outcomes of advanced technology programs, or other future events of interest to the DoD.  In addition, the rapid reaction of markets to knowledge held by only a few participants may provide an early warning system to avoid surprise.	The picture shows the throwing of darts at a dartboard, and indeed predicting the future is tricky. But, the pattern of darts indicates something interesting: "General Poll" and "Poll of Experts" is way off target. "Analysis Reports" are better, but still wide of the mark. "Delphi Methods" even better. The "Market Method" is implied to be highly accurate.
Genisys	Program Genisys is a FY02 new-start program. The Genisys program’s goal is to produce technology enabling ultra-large, all-source information repositories.  To predict, track, and preempt terrorist attacks, the U.S. requires a full-coverage database containing all information relevant to identifying: potential foreign terrorists and their possible supporters; their activities; prospective targets; and, their operational plans.  Current database technology is clearly insufficient to address this need.	This is the information storage and retrieval system. It includes distributed databases spread around the world, support for complex queries, and more.
Genoa	Project Genoa, in the process of concluding, provides the structured argumentation, decision-making and corporate memory to rapidly deal with and adjust to dynamic crisis management.	Computer aided decision making, by having the computer store and reference and link vast quantities of information. "Corporate Memory" is to store all information and actions taken by an organization, and make those avilable in later times so that the organization can learn and grow from what happened in the past.
Genoa II	Genoa II is a FY02 new-start program.  It will focus on developing information technology needed by teams of intelligence analysts and operations and policy personnel in attempting to anticipate and preempt terrorist threats to US interests.  Genoa II’s goal is to make such teams faster, smarter, and more joint in their day-to-day operations.  Genoa II will apply automation to team processes so that more information will be exploited, more hypotheses created and examined, more models built and populated with evidence, and in the larger sense, more crises dealt with simultaneously.	Bigger and better than Genoa. The picture shows multiple levels of information query systems and decision trees. That is, if you have a highly complex problem, how do you interpret everything and come up with an answer. For example, say you have a derelict airplane flying across the U.S., not responding to radio calls, just flying. Say, at the same time, there are international tensions. Is the airplane flying without response a simple accident, or is it related to the international tensions? Is it an innocent act, or an attack? To work this out, you might have to refer to dozens of pieces of data scattered all around, and analyze many possible interpretations of every piece of raw data.
Human ID at a Distance (HumanID)	The goal of the Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) program is to develop automated biometric identification technologies to detect, recognize and identify humans at great distances.  These technologies will provide critical early warning support for force protection and homeland defense against terrorist, criminal, and other human-based threats, and will prevent or decrease the success rate of such attacks against DoD operational facilities and installations.  Methods for fusing biometric technologies into advanced human identification systems will be developed to enable faster, more accurate and unconstrained identification of humans at significant standoff distances.	They mention "Face Recognition", "Gait Recognition" and "Iris Recognition", and the ability to do this at a distance. The distance is initially 25-150 feet, with a target of 500 foot range by 2004. They also desire a system that can operate 24/7 (all day long, every day). Identification is going to be based on the persons face, how they walk, and their eyes. Presumably when someone wants to sneak through an area known to be monitored, they would disguise themselves, but it would be very hard to disguise how they walk, or their eyes.
Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES)	The Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) program is developing advanced language processing technology to enable English speakers to find and interpret critical information in multiple languages without requiring knowledge of those languages.	Two other projects (Babylon and EARS) are involved with language translation. Obviously there are lots of languages in the world, and to understand others you have to understand their language. For the whole system to work, and automatically recognize threats, the system needs to automatically recognize threats in any language.
Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (WAE)	The goal of the Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (WAE) program is the development and demonstration of predictive technology to better anticipate and act against terrorists.  WAE is a revolutionary approach to identify predictive indicators of attacks by and the behavior of specific terrorists by examining their behavior in the broader context of their political, cultural and ideological environment.	This is the use of mathematical techniques, Wargaming Theory, to predict attacks. The picture mentions "Pre-attack behavior" and "post attack behavior", indicating that a group about to stage an attack will follow some pattern of activities that might tip off someone of the impending attack (if they knew what to look for).

Admiral Poindexter

Yes, this is the same Admiral Poindexter who was National Security Adviser to President Reagan, and was convicted for lieing to Congress over the Iran/Contra affair. The convictions were later overturned on a technicality.

Decoding the Terminology

Information Space: This is a mathematically related term referring to the vast amount of information. Contemplate having kerjillions of pieces of information ("hundreds of millions of documents"), some of which are related to one another, and the information you desire may be snippets of data scattered around. It's easy to see this information as a "cloud" of information, it is connected in multidimensionally complex ways, and it is the sum total of this information which is the "information space".

Queue: A queue is the same thing as a "waiting line", such as you experience when buying tickets at a movie theater. When "waiting in line" you are "in a queue".

"Leave-behind prototypes": Not entirely clear is this phrase. It appears that the prototype implementations created by the research organizations will be "left behind" so that the contracting agencies can continue to use the technology. For example "...as well as develop a series of increasingly powerful leave-behind prototypes that both provide immediate value to the Intelligence Community and stimulate feedback to guide follow-on research".

Data model: When designing a computer system part of what you design is the information which the computer system processes. Computer designs always "abstract" or "model" the processed information, because computers cannot directly process the real world. The phrase "data model" refers to the abstract form information takes when inside a computer.