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."
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.
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
You should also be aware that U.S. governments routinely acquire data from third-parties to circumvent constraints in place that prevent them from doing so, directly.
They also sell their own data, when not constrained against doing so. The many state budget crises have apparently exacerbated motivations to do so.
All that said, I can't view this DHS initiative as a positive development, WRT domestic monitoring.
Actually, I can see the point of passive monitoring. And I can't help but believe it's already done. The difference here may be the DHS, specifically, and the public nature -- announcing the initiative. Therefore perhaps also who will have access to the resulting system or systems.
Maybe I'm biased by my news consumption habits, but I worry about politicizing and agendas, when the DHS is involved.
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.
"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
You're not a tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorist, now are you?
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?
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.
• 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.
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"?
> 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"?
That's exactly what it is. When a government's filled with extremists, bet on the extreme.
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.
There were billions spent on ads, so the effect is pretty questionable given how small a piece of that they were and the overall tactics have been in use for at least a decade now.
That said, there's plenty to be mad about, but it's more in how Facebook was sharing everything for you (part of the reason I never made an account there) and less with the wranglings over what a ToS violation means on top of that.
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.
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.
> 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...) .
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
Answering that question may be the purpose of this request - since no one knows the state of discourse prior to or after any identified propaganda/ads, it's rather hard to assign any impact. By monitoring the discourse, DHS can then measure changes in sentiment on salient features in order to measure the impact of various propaganda/ad campaigns.
That being said, I think DHS might be going a bit overboard as far as the monitoring goes.
Cambridge Analytica served ads to people. This is something that all candidates, campaigns and their affiliates do. Sure it collected data on people through sketchy means, but the essential part of its work was to serve advertisements.
Similar companies have been employed by virtually every other presidential candidate in the last decade.
We can't be mad at CA without being mad at the entirety of industrial political adveritising.
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?
This comment breaks the HN guidelines badly, especially these:
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
... with predictably wretched results. Please don't do this again.
You do see that I didn't start any flame war, but a responder did? It's not a generic tangent because it refers directly to the content of the article. The intention is to illuminate the similarities, and hopefully bring about some empathy for others who don't want to be on lists for exercising their rights...
I notice you didn't warn the anti rights person who did start the flamewar, because that person refuses to acknowledge similarities between the two situations.
I notice you have a tendency to attack me because you clearly disagree with my opinions.
I'm obviously not welcome here. I'll go. You won't need to worry about any more wrongthink from me. Enjoy enforcing your opinions on everyone. Your board, your rules.
Introducing the flamewar topic makes you responsible for the flamewar, which is why I replied to you, as well as to at least one other user who made it worse.
I don't disagree with your opinions; I don't even know what they are. The only thing I care about is that users abide by the site rules when posting here, because if we don't actively take care of that, this place will go up in flames.
Speech didn't kill them a single bit more than water did, if you're using that logic:
What killed Holocaust victims?
Gas.
Why did they let that happen?
Because the people forcing them to go in had guns.
Why did they force them?
Because they worked under a man who commanded that they be killed.
How was he alive?
Because he drank water, preventing him from dying of dehydration.
No, I don't. The motive in the case of speech is to silence a populus/punish dissenters. The motive in the case of guns is quite overwhelmingly safety.
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."