Orwellian Irony

On one hand, we have Congress pondering the privacy of online shopping habits, as reported by ARS Technica, and a plan to “Rethink” online privacy and protect the public from data miners and evil corporations that are out to steal our everlasting souls.

Congress ponders privacy of your underwear, immortal soul

By Nate Anderson | Last updated about 21 hours ago

At a Congressional Internet privacy hearing on Tuesday, a group of middle-aged men had some questions about the ‘Net. Why was it such a creepy place? How come replying to spammers doesn’t get one immediately removed from their e-mail lists? And what is this talk we hear about websites gaining the rights to one’s immortal soul?

The creepiness was best summed up by the Senate Commerce Committee’s Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who in his opening statement compared the Internet to a deeply disturbing shopping mall. In this mall, there’s “a machine recording every store you enter and every product you look at, and every product you buy. You go into a bookstore. The machine records every book you purchase or peruse. Then, you go to the drugstore. The machine is watching you there, meticulously recording every product you pick up—from the shampoo to the allergy medicine to your personal prescription. [READ MORE...]

And on the other, as reported by WIRED, we have the CIA and Google investing in a start up company, Recorded Future, that will develop technology which “scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents.”

Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

• By Noah Shachtman

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science. [READ MORE...]

Is it just me, or is there some disparity in the messages coming out of Washington?