Monday, October 23, 2017

BULLETIN: Social Media Accounts are public.

by Angela K. Durden
Technology inventor protecting creator's copyrights. Business writer, novelist, songwriter, and Citizen Journalist.


An acquaintance from Bosnia is a naturalized citizen for at least 25 years. This person is horrified that DHS shall be storing information gleaned from social media accounts of holders of green cards and naturalized citizens.

My response was, "DHS has mine, too. It's all public information. Put out on the web. Where's the invasion of privacy?"

Understand this: I trust the DHS about as far as I can throw it. Especially as I learn more about it. 


But, look, if you lay your diary in the middle of a coffee shop and you invite people to come read it and interact with it, then I'm not exactly sure why you should complain if somebody takes notes on the content and studies it later.


Adam Schwartz at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco, said, "You have a tremendous invasion of privacy, and you have no showing that the program has done a thing to advance the safety of the people in our country."

So, DHS hasn't got enough information on the program to prove it works, and that because they don't have enough information on the efficacy of it, they shouldn't do it? Huh?

Nonprofit doublespeak makes me wonder who they are really funded by, but that doesn't mean they aren't right that abuses won't occur.



DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, says about themselves:

The genesis of that mission and of DARPA itself dates to the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and a commitment by the United States that, from that time forward, it would be the initiator and not the victim of strategic technological surprises. 
Working with innovators inside and outside of government, DARPA has repeatedly delivered on that mission, transforming revolutionary concepts and even seeming impossibilities into practical capabilities. 
The ultimate results have included not only game-changing military capabilities such as precision weapons and stealth technology, but also such icons of modern civilian society such as the Internet, automated voice recognition and language translation, and Global Positioning System receivers small enough to embed in myriad consumer devices.
[Paragraph breaks, italics, and bolded text in excerpt are mine.]

Law Enforcement Officers catch bad guys not because LEOs are so smart, but because bad guys are mostly stupid. If you take an ad out in the paper that you're going to rob a bank and the FBI shows up to meet you at the door, you can't exactly complain, now can you?

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