Making Terrorism last Forever

I soooo believe this....nothing better to exert control over people than fear and paranoia.

"The US has spent over one trillion dollars on the struggle against terrorism since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Iraq has taken the lion’s share of the amount - $748 billion.

The spending on anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan is 2.5 times less. Expert Sergey Golubev believes that the level of the terrorist threat in the world has grown because of the US-led anti-terrorist efforts. “They spent a trillion dollars to add more fuel to the fire of the terrorist war.

The Americans crushed Iraq and Afghanistan . There are too many people in these two countries who lost their homes, jobs and loved ones because of the USA, and those people are ready to do anything to harm the Americans.

Washington will have to pay for this politics. As for the situation in other countries, one may say that there is no country in the world that can defend itself against terrorist attacks. Recent attacks in India’s Mumbai prove that,” the expert said." - Full Article Source

Crowdsourcing for unlimited spying and more...

"When an ad hoc team of 5000 people who assembled in just two hours found 10 weather balloons hidden across the US by the Pentagon's research agency earlier this month, it was just another demonstration of the power of crowdsourcing – solving a task by appealing to a large undefined group of web users to each do a small chunk of it.

So far crowdsourcing has been associated with well-meaning altruism, such as the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia or searching for lost aviators. But crowdsourcing of a different flavour has started to emerge. Law enforcement officials in Texas have installed a network of CCTV cameras to monitor key areas along that state's 1900-kilometre-long border with Mexico.

To help screen the footage, a website lets anyone log in to watch a live feed from a border camera and report suspicious activity. A similar system called Internet Eyes, which pays online viewers to spot shoplifters from in-store camera feeds, is set to launch in the UK in 2010.

An Iranian website is offering rewards for identifying people in photos taken during protests over June's elections. Some people have declared those examples chilling. Now Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard University law professor and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says the next step may be for such efforts to get web users to help out covertly.

In a recent talk, "Minds for Sale", at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, he pointed out that this could be done right away, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a service that provides a platform for anyone to farm out simple tasks.

In a speculative example, Zittrain has calculated that, assuming a population in Iran of around 72 million people, it would cost around $17,000 for the government to use Mechanical Turk to identify any arbitrary person's picture, without the users that are doing it realising the cause they have enlisted in.

The scheme would show "Turkers" a photo of a protest, or just faces extracted from one, along with five randomly chosen photos from the country's ID card database, and asked to say whether or not there is any match. Users would receive a few cents each time they contribute.

Furthermore, Zittrain says that such a task might be made into an addictive game, similar to Google's image labeller. "The people making the identifications in India or the US, idly doing this on their lunch hour instead of Minesweeper, would have no idea of the implications of what they are doing," Zittrain said in the talk. "I think people ought to know how their work is being used," he told New Scientist.

Crowdsourcing's power to compartmentalise and abstract away the true meaning of tasks turns human intelligence into a commodity. Zittrain's thought experiment shows how it could potentially entice people into participating in a project that they otherwise wouldn't support." - Full Article Source

Free Speech applies to EVERYONE!

It's ok for them but not ok for anyone with an opposing view, which just so happens to be TRUE.

"A conservative activist and Illinois comptroller candidate was escorted from the Illinois State Capitol building Wednesday when he tried to remove a sign put up by an atheist group. "It doesn't matter how we feel about the message on a display," Haupt said. "Our obligation is to protect the property within the state Capitol building, and we would do the same for any other display." But Kelly called the sign "hate speech," and said he does not believe it is appropriate for a sign that "mocks" religion to be placed next to a Christmas tree and also near a nativity scene. The sign reads:

"At the time of the winter solstice, let reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is just myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

The sign was also on display at the Capitol at this time last year. The group says it filed for a permit to post the display in response to the state's decision to put up the nativity." - Full Article Source

Drunken Senator debating health care reform

Ain't this disgusting? He should be fined, then FIRED!!!