Posted on 11/09/2002 9:31:25 AM PST by rs79bm
From the above link;
The New York Times reported today that the Pentagons Office of Strategic Influence is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations in an effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries.
The OSI was created shortly after September 11 to publicize the U.S. governments perspective in Islamic countries and to generate support for the U.S.s war on terror. This latest announcement raises grave concerns that far from being an honest effort to explain U.S. policy, the OSI may be a profoundly undemocratic program devoted to spreading disinformation and misleading the public, both at home and abroad. At the same time, involving reporters in Pentagon disinformation puts the lives of working journalists at risk.
Some day soon, all you folks who believe this crap,...like this poor soul, are gonna' wake up and smell the coffee, and by then, it will be too late.
This is not a war on terror. That's just the distraction. This is really a war on the American People. There's no other way to look at the rediculous combination of the concepts of "homeland security" and "open borders". The two don't mix. But they're not supposed to. ...Yes, let's all remember. WE'RE THE ENEMY IN THE EYES OF UNCLE SAMMY-RAY.
Excellent point.
I would be shocked if "preliminary discussions" were not held. But this is just the Democrat's tying to turn the public against us. The motives of this publication needs to be publicly attacked and fast or they may succeed.
Actually, it should make everyone nervous since the more information the government gets the less time it seems to spend actually looking for real criminals.
In the D.C. area, federal government agents harassed people who bought .223 rifles in that area who also happened to own white vans. This, despite the fact that not only had the perps not bought a rifle in that area, and not only were they not driving a white van, but there were other obvious leads (such as a blue Caprice whose plate was recorded at 10 of the post-shooting roadblocks) the police were ignoring.
Perhaps if there was some evidence that new intelligence-gathering abilities would actually be used to solve crimes, there might be at least some merit to supporting them. As it is, though, it seems the government so mis-uses its intelligence-gathering facilities that adding more would likely just further impede effective law enforcement.
The same was said about the RICO - that only the members of Mafia should be nervous. And now it is being applied against pro-life activists and many others. The only thing common between a nun praying before the abortion clinic and John Giotti might be Roman Catholic background, but RICO is being applied to non-Catholics as well.
Total Information Awareness (TIA) System
Program Manager: Dr. John Poindexter
Deputy PM: Dr. Robert PoppProgram Objective:
The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is a FY02 new-start program. 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.
Program Strategy:
The TIA program strategy is to integrate technologies developed by DARPA (and elsewhere as appropriate) into a series of increasingly powerful prototype systems that can be stress-tested in operationally relevant environments, using real-time feedback to refine concepts of operation and performance requirements down to the component level. The TIA program will develop and integrate information technologies into fully functional, leave-behind prototypes that are reliable, easy to install, and packaged with documentation and source code (though not necessarily complete in terms of desired features) that will enable the intelligence community to evaluate new technologies through experimentation, and rapidly transition it to operational use, as appropriate. Accordingly, the TIA program will work in close collaboration with one or more U.S. intelligence agencies that will provide operational guidance and technology evaluation, and act as TIA system transition partners.
Technically, the TIA program is focusing on the development of: 1) architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database, for system elements associated with database population, and for integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools; 2) novel methods for populating the database from existing sources, create innovative new sources, and invent new algorithms for mining, combining, and refining information for subsequent inclusion into the database; and, 3) revolutionary new models, algorithms, methods, tools, and techniques for analyzing and correlating information in the database to derive actionable intelligence.
Words to remember. I sincerly hope that people wake up, if it's not already too late. How many people here are going to lobby against Homeland Security to Congress though I wonder?
BTW, excellent profile page.
Ah, but we have nothing to fear from a REPUBLICAN controlled Congress according to most people here on FR. Right.
As Gerald Ford said (paraphrase), "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got."
HE said that? I knew there was a reason that I voted for him.. :)
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