A Simple Question for Silicon Valley: Why Do You Hate Freedom?

Data mining by the government for general surveillance is already far worse than you imagine, if even half of this stuff works. With freedom on the internet clearly controllable with technology cheerfully supplied by U.S. vendors, and the internet proving instead to a primary source of total government monitoring of all, not just political, activity, the remaining question is whether political or even personal liberty is possible in this developing climate.

The "mining" language implies not everyone is monitored, that tools simply collect disembodied data. But the data is collected just the same - there's no real difference between an unread database and an unread secret police report if the information is the same and available and access is unconstrained by law. The government can monitor anyone at anytime, and therefore act against anyone at anytime.

Today's NYT:

An earlier N.S.A. patent, in 1999, focused on a software solution for generating a list of topics from computer-generated text. Such a capacity hints at the ability to extract the content of telephone conversations automatically. That might permit the agency to mine millions of phone conversations and then select a handful for human inspection.

As the N.S.A. visit to the Silicon Valley venture capitalists this month indicates, the actual development of such technologies often comes from private companies.

In 2003, Virage, a Silicon Valley company, began supplying a voice transcription product that recognized and logged the text of television programming for government and commercial customers. Under perfect conditions, the system could be 95 percent accurate in capturing spoken text. Such technology has potential applications in monitoring phone conversations as well....

......alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.'s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.