Information control, or, How to get to Orwellian governance

Okie- Blotham is like a visitor who comes to your home and then urinates on the floor. Like most Canadians with bad manners and even though he had never gotten involved in a political campaign before and will not in the future, unless he can get someone to push the wheelchair. Because he is a left wing partisan he will not tell us on these threads of the illegalities going on in Canada that make our peccadillos look like nothing.

Read below, Okie-

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Cheers- Okie and good luck!!!

Murdoch buys stake in Australian rival

Chris Tryhorn and agencies
Friday October 20, 2006
MediaGuardian.co.uk

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has bought a stake in rival Australian newspaper group Fairfax, following changes to the country's media laws.
News Corp said the acquisition of a 7.5% stake, which cost around A$360m (£145m), represented "purely an investment".

However, it underlines Mr Murdoch's determination to take advantage of what has been described as the biggest shakeup of Australian media ownership rules in 20 years.

Earlier this week the country's parliament passed laws allowing more foreign investment and cross-media ownership in Australian media companies, though ministers have said the changes would not come into force until 2007.

Iraq Aims to Limit Mortality Data
Health Ministry Told Not to Release Civilian Death Toll to U.N.

By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 20, 2006; Page A16

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 19 -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office has instructed the country's health ministry to stop providing mortality figures to the United Nations, jeopardizing a key source of information on the number of civilian war dead in Iraq, according to a U.N. document.

A confidential cable from the United Nations' top official in Baghdad, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi of Pakistan, said the Iraqi prime minister is seeking to exercise greater control over the release of the country's politically sensitive death toll. U.N. officials expressed concern that the move threatens to politicize the process of counting Iraq's dead and muddy international efforts to gain a clear snapshot of the scale of killing in Iraq.

Thank goodness we have people in government that actually know something about energy.

POM now on record also, claiming there isn't much to like about America. Revel claims now he was misunderstood, that he just dislikes the America as represented by Bush. My suspicions keep being confirmed, that liberals really do not like America. I didn't think you would admit it, POM!

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 ?- A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

Such a "sentiment analysis" is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.

Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush's use of the term "axis of evil," the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.

American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has included the routine translation of articles from many foreign publications and news services.

The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look "to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative of potential threats to the nation," a statement by the department said.

It could take several years for such a monitoring system to be in place, said Joe Kielman, coordinator of the research effort. The monitoring would not extend to United States news, Mr. Kielman said.

"We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate," he said.

Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.

"It is just creepy and Orwellian," said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Andrei Sitov, Washington bureau chief of the Itar-Tass news agency of Russia, said he hoped that the objective did not go beyond simply identifying threats to efforts to stifle criticism about an American president or administration.

"This is what makes your country great, the open society where people can criticize their own government," Mr. Sitov said.

The researchers, using an grant provided by a research group once affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency, have complied a database of hundreds of articles that it is being used to train a computer to recognize, rank and interpret statements.

The software would need to be able to distinguish between statements like "this spaghetti is good" and "this spaghetti is not very good ?- it's excellent," said Claire T. Cardie, a professor of computer science at Cornell.

Professor Cardie ranked the second statement as a more intense positive opinion than the first.

The articles in the database include work from many American newspapers and news wire services, including The Miami Herald and The New York Times, as well as foreign sources like Agence France-Presse and The Dawn, a newspaper in Pakistan.

One article discusses how a rabid fox bit a grazing cow in Romania, hardly a threat to the United States. Another item, an editorial in response to Mr. Bush's use in 2002 of "axis of evil" to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea, said: "The U.S. is the first nation to have developed nuclear weapons. Moreover, the U.S. is the first and only nation ever to deploy such weapons."

The approach, called natural language processing, has been under development for decades. It is widely used to summarize basic facts in a text or to create abridged versions of articles.

But interpreting and rating expressions of opinion, without making too many errors, has been much more challenging, said Professor Cardie and Janyce M. Wiebe, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. Their system would include a confidence rating for each "opinion" that it evaluates and would allow an official to refer quickly to the actual text that the computer indicates contains an intense anti-American statement.

Ultimately, the government could in a semiautomated way track a statement by specific individuals abroad or track reports by particular foreign news outlets or journalists, rating comments about American policies or officials.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the effort recalled the aborted 2002 push by a Defense Department agency to develop a tracking system called Total Information Awareness that was intended to detect terrorists by analyzing troves of information.

"That is really chilling," Mr. Rotenberg said. "And it seems far afield from the mission of homeland security."

Federal law prohibits the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies from building such a database on American citizens, and no effort would be made to do that, a spokesman for the department, Christopher Kelly, said. But there would be no such restrictions on using foreign news media, Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Kielman, the project coordinator, said questions on using the software were premature because the department was just now financing the basic research necessary to set up an operating system.

Professors Cardie and Wiebe said they understood that there were legitimate questions about the ultimate use of their software.

"There has to be guidelines and restrictions on the use of this kind of technology by the government," Professor Wiebe said. "But it doesn't mean it is not useful. It can just as easily help the government understand what is going on in places around the world."

okie wrote:

POM now on record also, claiming there isn't much to like about America. Revel claims now he was misunderstood, that he just dislikes the America as represented by Bush. My suspicions keep being confirmed, that liberals really do not like America. I didn't think you would admit it, POM!

You're even more naive than I thought.

Who would be happy in a warmongering nation, headed by an illiterate embarrassment?

Who would be happy when there are people like you running around, denying all the environmental problems we have, limiting the lives of everyone with sense and intelligence?

Would it make you happy if you could send me off to a re-education camp somewhere, plainoldme?

Thank goodness I am happy even though there are nuts like you running around in this country. If your happiness depends on other people, I would suggest you visit a shrink, and soon.

CIA tried to silence EU on torture flights

Rove's not-so-big-tent strategy
In the hopes of shoring up what's left of the base, the Bush administration erected a tent on the White House lawn Tuesday and invited 42 mostly right-wing radio talk-show hosts for chats with Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett and Michael Chertoff.

Who would be happy when there are people like you running around, denying all the environmental problems we have, limiting the lives of everyone with sense and intelligence?

Who said anything about my happiness depending upon others?

You really can't read.

Quote:

Rove's not-so-big-tent strategy
In the hopes of shoring up what's left of the base, the Bush administration erected a tent on the White House lawn Tuesday and invited 42 mostly right-wing radio talk-show hosts for chats with Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett and Michael Chertoff.

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/

[url=http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2326792#2326792]plainoldme[/url] wrote: