
Homeland Security to Compile Database of Journalists, Bloggers - pwtweet
https://biglawbusiness.com/homeland-security-to-compile-database-of-journalists-bloggers/
======
snowwrestler
For folks who are not aware, there are like a dozen commercial products that
already do this.

If you sign on with Cision, for example, you can pull an up-to-date list of
reporters in any U.S. market, filtered by beat, outlet, channel, topic, etc.,
and send an email to all of them by pushing a button. Then you can click over
to the monitoring dashboard and pull media stats by reporter, keyword,
channel, etc. Can't remember if Cision does sentiment but I know a lot of
others do.

This story is being reported and commented like "DHS seeks to create new tech
capability." The reality is more like "DHS seeks to choose an agency who will
use commercial OTS products to help DHS do something that any major brand has
been doing for years already."

~~~
ibeckermayer
For folks who are not aware, there is a huge difference between a private
company doing something and a government doing something. Government is the
institution of violent enforcement, making them much more powerful and
potentially dangerous than a PR consulting firm.

~~~
lovich
That's only true as long as corporations remain relatively small in power.
There has been a definite trend in consolidation of power amongst the larger
corporations and if it continues there won't be much practical difference
between them or the government

~~~
ibeckermayer
I agree.

------
MikeGale
I guess they're also putting out tenders to sharpen the guillotines.

We'll see a lot of sock and meat puppets from the central panopticon playing
in this discussion. They'll say how normal this is, nothing to worry about and
insult those who are worried. Watch them, it's quite amusing.

------
user982
"Despite what some reporters may suggest, this is nothing more than the
standard practice of monitoring current events in the media. Any suggestion
otherwise is fit for tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy
theorists." —
[https://twitter.com/SpoxDHS/status/982372727309963264](https://twitter.com/SpoxDHS/status/982372727309963264)

You're not a tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorist, now
are you?

~~~
tzs
That tweet might have been amusing if our President was not a tin foil hat
wearing conspiracy theorist (not sure what he thinks about black helicopters).

Question for down voters: Can you seriously make a case that he is not a
conspiracy theorist?

~~~
zo1
Well, you stated a claim that seems quite outlandish. Then you edit and
question down-voters if they can "seriously" prove you wrong? Unless it's
well-known fact or something agreed on by everyone, making such a bold
statement would require _you_ to prove _your_ case. Not the other way around.

~~~
tzs
Theories he has stated or expressed approval of:

• Obama was not born in the United States.

• Climate change is a hoax.

• Ted Cruz's father may have been involved in the Kennedy assassination.

Want more? Just Google for Trump and conspiracy theories, and you'll find
plenty of articles covering a bunch of them. Example [1].

> Unless it's well-known fact or something agreed on by everyone, making such
> a bold statement would require you to prove your case. Not the other way
> around.

He tweets about this stuff frequently. Those tweets are well covered in the
press. So yes, it is well known.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-conspiracy-
theor...](http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-conspiracy-
theories-2016-5)

------
pensativo
First, this is somewhat ambitious...

Second, what's the purpose of this? I can imagine it'll be quite useful to BBG
properties like Voice of America, RadioFreeEurope and generally US government
PR/propaganda, but how am I supposed to not worry that this will be used for
censorship via US-based companies and some future law combating "fake news"
and/or "hate speech"?

~~~
TrainedMonkey
1\. You got to start somewhere.

2\. Data is valuable.

3\. You can't. As you built more capabilities to process the data it becomes
more valuable. Incidentally that is why I think Facebook is so valuable.
Cambridge Analytica managed to affect U.S. elections with a small subset of
this data.

~~~
jacquesm
> Cambridge Analytica managed to affect U.S. elections with a small subset of
> this data.

Is this an accepted fact now? I know they tried but is there hard proof that
without them it would have been a different outcome?

~~~
TrainedMonkey
I am pretty sure that they tried and had some effect. It is hard to estimate
the magnitude of the effect and probably impossible to prove if they managed
to sway the elections.

~~~
hpcjoe
I am as incensed over Cambridge Analytica's effort to microtarget, as I was
over OFA's similar effort, using similar data from similar sources ... though
... Cambridge's source was an allegedly dishonest broker from what has been
reported, and OFA went to the source and got assistance.

The headline isn't and shouldn't be that Cambridge impacted the election. This
is obviously not true. There are other similar claims about other entities
impacting the election with positively miniscule spends on adverts that are
even less true than this, but they seem to be taken as gospel as being true by
some.

The headline should be that we all collectively give FB, Twitter, etc. as much
information as we wish, are encouraged to provide more, and thus increasing
the value of us as the commodity being sold.

I resisted FB for many years, until I saw it could be used as an communication
system for my family (who were not responding to emails/calls). It has some
value to me there.

But the sheer scale of the humint gathering, the analytics they are putting in
place, boggles the mind.

Cambridge used a bad data broker, and did exactly what OFA did 4 years
earlier. Mebbe we should focus our anger on this, and demand no microtargeting
using socially derived data for elections. I didn't see anyone protesting that
in 2012. Why now in 2016?

That's part of an important question to answer ... as we cannot excuse
violations of privacy when it goes in a direction we like, versus a direction
we don't.

~~~
paganel
> Mebbe we should focus our anger on this, and demand no microtargeting using
> socially derived data for elections

Just one out of the many links for the lazy, written just after the 2012
elections: "How Data and Micro-Targeting Won the 2012 Election for Obama -
Antony Young-Mindshare North America"
([https://www.mediavillage.com/article/how-data-and-micro-
targ...](https://www.mediavillage.com/article/how-data-and-micro-targeting-
won-the-2012-election-for-obama-antony-young-mindshare-north-america/)) .

Reading it now is just, I don't know how to say it because English is not my
mother tongue, but maybe ghoul-y is the word? That feeling when you watch a
series-B horror movie and you can see the monster is in the house, is just in
the room next to the victim, but you can't tell the victim because, well, you
have no psych powers. Just copy-pasting some of the paragraphs from that
article (which I had found after a quick google search) shows that we should
have known about this monster since at least (now) 6 years, we should have
seen that it was in the room just next to us, but we did nothing, we only made
it worse:

> How did Obama win? (...) At the heart of these two strategies, was micro-
> targeting.

> Micro-targeting is the ability to dissect in this case, the voter population
> in to narrow segments and customize messaging to them, both in on-the-ground
> activities and in the media. (...) But it was the sophistication and the
> scale of how they executed this strategy that in the end, proved the knock-
> out punch for the Democrats.

and especially

> The Obama camp in preparing for this election, established a huge Analytics
> group that comprised of behavioral scientists, data technologists and
> mathematicians. They worked tirelessly to gather and interpret data to
> inform every part of the campaign. They built up a voter file that included
> voter history, demographic profiles, but also collected numerous other data
> points around interests … for example, did they give to charitable
> organizations or which magazines did they read to help them better
> understand who they were and better identify the group of 'persuadables' to
> target.

and

> That data was able to be drilled down to zip codes, individual households
> and in many cases individuals within those households.

and then it gets WTF-y (pardon my French):

> Volunteers canvassing door to door or calling constituents were able to
> access these profiles via an app accessed on an iPad, iPhone or Android
> mobile device to provide an instant transcript to help them steer their
> conversations. They were also able to input new data from their conversation
> back into the database real time.

> The profiles informed their direct and email fundraising efforts. They used
> issues such Obama's support for gay marriage or Romney's missteps in his
> portrayal of women to directly target more liberal and professional women on
> their database, with messages that "Obama is for women," using that
> opportunity to solicit contributions to his campaign

------
flounders
The article states that the reason for them doing this is to help combat
foreign influence in elections. Would having access to this information help
track trends in real time and investigate who is doing the influencing? What
else could they do to counteract foreign influence?

------
mozumder
Why make a new database when they could just use Cision? Does government not
already use that?

------
pouta
How does apply to such contract?

Is it available to non-US companies?

