How might covert interests acting as a parasite within an authoritarian regime -- with access to trillions of military research dollars annually -- construct a centrally-directed, practical, electromagnetic mood manipulation apparatus that can be implemented by distributed means?
I'm going to sketch something out for you step-by-step:
Spend some time at www.aolstalker.com, and think about whether it's not a little bit like reading somebody else's mind. Then think about what commercial advertisers and the National Security Agency are doing with your searches, and think about the possibility of electromagnetic Google Advertising for the psyche.
What sorts of electromagnetic fields might be useful in this context?
To start thinking about this, we have to first understand something called "stochastic interference." In this context, its relevance is related to the idea that discrete randomness can create the appearance of global statistical continuity.
Here's a useful analogy:
1. We know that some types of electromagnetic radiation cause cancer
2. We know that the radiation from powerlines probably doesn't cause cancer
However, we also know that:
3. The radiation from powerlines (in the countryside and in your walls) is pervasive
4. The radiation from powerlines is not EXACTLY 60hz
Point 4. is important. If we view the 60hz Alternating Current on the power lines as a signal, we must recognize that there will be some noise on the line. Because the electrons "traveling" down the power lines interact with the material of the powerlines, the powerlines will resonate at different frequencies. The 60hz AC signal will bleed into other frequencies.
So we can accept points 1. and 2. above, but we should also ask: can we get cancer from the radiation emitted by power lines PLUS all the other sources of electromagnetic radiation in our environment? Can the radiation from powerlines interact with LOCAL radiation sources to produce cancer-causing radiation?
Scientists who study "stochastic interference" study these sorts of problems.
So what sorts of electromagnetic fields might be useful for practical electromagnetic mood management?
It turns out that there are all sorts of devices in your environment that can produce very specific types of electromagnetic radiation, which can be made to stochastically interact with a global signal.
Tempest for Eliza, a piece of open source Linux software, will allow you to use a conventional CRT monitor to broadcast an AM radio signal. You can broadcast MP3's to your radio from your computer monitor!
Now think about how close people sit to computer monitors all day, and examine some of the patents recently issued to Hendricus Loos.
Now imagine the capbilities of the previous two links delivered to you in secret (either as a virus like the FBI's Carnivore system, or else built into your commercial software at the request of a central government).
What would the goal of such a system be?
Well, think about clocks. We often think about clocks as tools used to measure out the day. But from the perspective of systems theory, clocks are also a way to synchronize the behavior of large numbers of humans, who are not otherwise in direct contact with oneanother. Clocks are pretty amazing, really.
We all know we've found all sorts of great uses for clocks. They're especially good for industrialists.
Systems theory tells us that many diverse types of organized systems can be found to exhibit the same mathematical behaviors. The math for thermodynamics, optics, entropy, and image compression is all related.
I wonder what other sorts of uses the NSA has for this patent on synchronization methodology.
How might electromagnetic radiation be put into the environment in sufficient quantities and with sufficient control to affect a mass manipulation of mood?
It turns out that there are all sorts of suitable facilities under the control of central governments. Consider the US Government using HAARP and ELF transmitters such as that at Clam Lake to broadcast a range of acceptable mood alterations. Devices in your local environment with processing capabilities, such as your cellphone or your computer, may then generate radiation that cancels out or enhances certain resonances in the ambient environment. The appropriate signal for a local device to generate can be selected algorithmically according to your Internet browsing behavior.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Monday, June 25, 2007
Regarding the Implications of MySpace Link Filtering
Perhaps the days of the "Googlebomb" are drawing to a close.
MySpace has begun to re-code outbound links from user pages in an effort to mask the URL to which these links refer.
Outbound links from MySpace pages are being redirected through www.msplinks.com in a move that is perhaps related to MySpace's recent advertising agreement with Google, and directed towards ensuring that MySpace spam doesn't interfere with Google's PageRank algorithm.
People who have grown up with Google might not recognize what a dramatic improvement it represented, compared to earlier Internet search engines. Previous to Google, many search engines essentially ordered results according to the frequency with which a user's search phrase appeared on indexed pages. Yahoo, the pre-Google Internet search authority, wasn't strictly a search engine, but took a "brute force" approach to presenting the Internet in an ordered manner (focusing its efforts on creating a human-edited directory, rather than on developing sophisticated algorithms for sorting indexed pages).
Before long, spammers learned to exploit the page-sorting algorithms commonly used by search engines by filling pages with invisible text that wasn't really relevant to a user's query.
In response, various improvements were made to popular methods of relevance ranking. But the big breakthrough in Internet search technology responsible for Google's success was really a psychological insight.
The basic psychological assumption that underlies Google's PageRank algorithm is that humans defer to authority; the more humans defer to a particular source, the more authoritative that source is considered to be. Thus, the page that comes up first in a Google search is the page that has the most pages linking to it under a given search phrase. Each time a page links to another, that link is considered a vote in favor of viewing the link's destination as authoritative.
Thus, the ability of MySpace spammers to produce large numbers of links that are indexed by Google represents a threat to Google's (economically successful) definition of authority.
The point of indexing and algorithmically analyzing web pages for the purposes of an Internet search is to uncover patterns in the collected data. Search engines seek to identify the same types of patterns that human cognition would identify. In a very direct sense, Google's algorithm can be viewed as a statistical description of certain aspects of human behavior. And what is dangerous about the MySpace link redirection scheme is that it seeks to "edit" the observable results of human behavior in order to make the collected data fit the mathematical descriptions upon which Google's business model is based.
Whether this is evidence of a central authority administered by distributed means or is evidence of an "invisible hand" may become clear insofar as whether or how such link redirection schemes proliferate.
The benefits of such a scheme to a central authority should be evident to anybody sufficiently acquainted with distributed systems, cognitive science, systems theory, or the current political situation in the United States. If the emergent features of Google's algorithms can be considered as presenting authoritative accounts of opinion (as in the case of the "failure" Googlebomb) as well as authoritative accounts of fact, then the manipulation of the algorithm may be able to effect the manipulation of opinion (and thereby, the perception of fact).
If MySpace spam is a problem for Google, wouldn't it be easier for Google to exclude MySpace profiles, and index only official MySpace content? Is Google's advertising agreement with MySpace a buyout, rich-guys-scratching-eachother's-backs-and-the-public-good-be-damned, or subsidized (directly or indirectly) by interests in the US central government?
The significance of MySpace link redirection may be more subtle, however. This may be evidence of "flocking behavior" among powerful corporations, whose behavior is entangled with and constrained by political interests. The financial interests of various types of organizations may be converging on certain types of social interaction.
It is also important to consider whether such a link redirection scheme can be used as a form of censorship.
However one wishes to account for the appearance of this practice in our present online environment, it will be vitally important for the preservation of personal liberty that those private individuals whose trade subsists in free expression - everybody from the scientist to the artist - be allowed to carry out his or her work in the absence of censorship. Developments in online communications are having a profound impact on culture and social organization. Censorship has a ripple effect in these types of social systems.
In any event, it will be important to watch whether or how such link redirection schemes proliferate.
MySpace has begun to re-code outbound links from user pages in an effort to mask the URL to which these links refer.
Outbound links from MySpace pages are being redirected through www.msplinks.com in a move that is perhaps related to MySpace's recent advertising agreement with Google, and directed towards ensuring that MySpace spam doesn't interfere with Google's PageRank algorithm.
People who have grown up with Google might not recognize what a dramatic improvement it represented, compared to earlier Internet search engines. Previous to Google, many search engines essentially ordered results according to the frequency with which a user's search phrase appeared on indexed pages. Yahoo, the pre-Google Internet search authority, wasn't strictly a search engine, but took a "brute force" approach to presenting the Internet in an ordered manner (focusing its efforts on creating a human-edited directory, rather than on developing sophisticated algorithms for sorting indexed pages).
Before long, spammers learned to exploit the page-sorting algorithms commonly used by search engines by filling pages with invisible text that wasn't really relevant to a user's query.
In response, various improvements were made to popular methods of relevance ranking. But the big breakthrough in Internet search technology responsible for Google's success was really a psychological insight.
The basic psychological assumption that underlies Google's PageRank algorithm is that humans defer to authority; the more humans defer to a particular source, the more authoritative that source is considered to be. Thus, the page that comes up first in a Google search is the page that has the most pages linking to it under a given search phrase. Each time a page links to another, that link is considered a vote in favor of viewing the link's destination as authoritative.
Thus, the ability of MySpace spammers to produce large numbers of links that are indexed by Google represents a threat to Google's (economically successful) definition of authority.
The point of indexing and algorithmically analyzing web pages for the purposes of an Internet search is to uncover patterns in the collected data. Search engines seek to identify the same types of patterns that human cognition would identify. In a very direct sense, Google's algorithm can be viewed as a statistical description of certain aspects of human behavior. And what is dangerous about the MySpace link redirection scheme is that it seeks to "edit" the observable results of human behavior in order to make the collected data fit the mathematical descriptions upon which Google's business model is based.
Whether this is evidence of a central authority administered by distributed means or is evidence of an "invisible hand" may become clear insofar as whether or how such link redirection schemes proliferate.
The benefits of such a scheme to a central authority should be evident to anybody sufficiently acquainted with distributed systems, cognitive science, systems theory, or the current political situation in the United States. If the emergent features of Google's algorithms can be considered as presenting authoritative accounts of opinion (as in the case of the "failure" Googlebomb) as well as authoritative accounts of fact, then the manipulation of the algorithm may be able to effect the manipulation of opinion (and thereby, the perception of fact).
If MySpace spam is a problem for Google, wouldn't it be easier for Google to exclude MySpace profiles, and index only official MySpace content? Is Google's advertising agreement with MySpace a buyout, rich-guys-scratching-eachother's-backs-and-the-public-good-be-damned, or subsidized (directly or indirectly) by interests in the US central government?
The significance of MySpace link redirection may be more subtle, however. This may be evidence of "flocking behavior" among powerful corporations, whose behavior is entangled with and constrained by political interests. The financial interests of various types of organizations may be converging on certain types of social interaction.
It is also important to consider whether such a link redirection scheme can be used as a form of censorship.
However one wishes to account for the appearance of this practice in our present online environment, it will be vitally important for the preservation of personal liberty that those private individuals whose trade subsists in free expression - everybody from the scientist to the artist - be allowed to carry out his or her work in the absence of censorship. Developments in online communications are having a profound impact on culture and social organization. Censorship has a ripple effect in these types of social systems.
In any event, it will be important to watch whether or how such link redirection schemes proliferate.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The Weaponization of the Magnetosphere
I recently came across some lumbering bit of bureaucratese called "Radiation Belt Remediation."
Previously, I had only heard the word "remediation" used in the sense "to repair," as in "environmental remediation," and so my first thought was some concern that, like our air, fields, and waters, we screwed everything up real good in our magnetosphere too.
There seems to be an aspect of doublespeak in this term, however. An article called The Atmospheric Implications of Radiation Belt Remediation implies that “Radiation Belt Remediation (RBR)” describes "studies...being undertaken to bring about practical human control of the radiation belts."
The charged particles in our upper atmosphere have been the object of scientific and military research for many years. Projects from Starfish Prime to HAARP have sought to understand and manipulate various properties of the Earth's electromagnetic fields.
But it would appear that RBR is not so much a "program" as a "doctrine" or a "goal." Institutional goals and doctrines have a strange life of their own: a new President every 4-8 years has little effect on most of the day-to-day functioning of the government; a lot of bureaucrats spend their whole lives behind the same desk.
Because it is not a program, but rather a more general sort of institutional goal, it is an organizing principle for many programs. There are all sorts of studies underway at various facilities around the world probing various aspects of the earth's electromagnetic fields.
I suspect that facilities like HAARP and the Clam Lake ELF transmitter work in concert, using constructive and destructive interference to generate local effects from global signals. That is, I suspect these facilities function together as a system - like a radio telescope array - about which different researchers make different types of observations.
I imagine some scientists use this system to influence the magnetosphere, to observe and model how the magnetosphere responds. They probably use all sorts of advanced computing technologies in the process. There are probably lots and lots of military dollars involved in many different places, with dual-use projects left and right.
The military is clearly interested in the ability to manipulate the earth's electromagnetic fields. What, specifically, might the military's interest be?
It turns out there are all sorts of military applications for the earth's electromagnetic fields.
The most straightforward application is communications: a part of the atmosphere can be used as a temporary antenna in much the same way as the ionization trail of a meteorite can be used as a temporary antenna. The advantage of such a technology has to do with security: if an adversary doesn't know where a signal is going to come from, it is more difficult to detect and decode that signal.
Some applications have to do with defense ("defense" in a literal sense, not in the American sense in which "defense" is a euphemism for "war"). If you can focus a large amount of energy at one place in the atmosphere, you can use this energy to heat a column of air. Such a mechanism may be sufficient to disrupt the course of a ballistic missile.
Some applications have to do with offense. A powerful, focused, electromagnetic pulse can disrupt communications or disable a power grid. Some applications may be oriented towards the weaponization of space.
Beyond the twisted irony in the doublespeak of the word "remediation" in this case, I find it extremely troubling the extent to which persons in my government are willing to turn EVERYTHING AROUND ME into a weapon.
Does anybody know who these people are and why they should be trusted? Do they really know what their experiments are doing to our planet?
Previously, I had only heard the word "remediation" used in the sense "to repair," as in "environmental remediation," and so my first thought was some concern that, like our air, fields, and waters, we screwed everything up real good in our magnetosphere too.
There seems to be an aspect of doublespeak in this term, however. An article called The Atmospheric Implications of Radiation Belt Remediation implies that “Radiation Belt Remediation (RBR)” describes "studies...being undertaken to bring about practical human control of the radiation belts."
The charged particles in our upper atmosphere have been the object of scientific and military research for many years. Projects from Starfish Prime to HAARP have sought to understand and manipulate various properties of the Earth's electromagnetic fields.
But it would appear that RBR is not so much a "program" as a "doctrine" or a "goal." Institutional goals and doctrines have a strange life of their own: a new President every 4-8 years has little effect on most of the day-to-day functioning of the government; a lot of bureaucrats spend their whole lives behind the same desk.
Because it is not a program, but rather a more general sort of institutional goal, it is an organizing principle for many programs. There are all sorts of studies underway at various facilities around the world probing various aspects of the earth's electromagnetic fields.
I suspect that facilities like HAARP and the Clam Lake ELF transmitter work in concert, using constructive and destructive interference to generate local effects from global signals. That is, I suspect these facilities function together as a system - like a radio telescope array - about which different researchers make different types of observations.
I imagine some scientists use this system to influence the magnetosphere, to observe and model how the magnetosphere responds. They probably use all sorts of advanced computing technologies in the process. There are probably lots and lots of military dollars involved in many different places, with dual-use projects left and right.
The military is clearly interested in the ability to manipulate the earth's electromagnetic fields. What, specifically, might the military's interest be?
It turns out there are all sorts of military applications for the earth's electromagnetic fields.
The most straightforward application is communications: a part of the atmosphere can be used as a temporary antenna in much the same way as the ionization trail of a meteorite can be used as a temporary antenna. The advantage of such a technology has to do with security: if an adversary doesn't know where a signal is going to come from, it is more difficult to detect and decode that signal.
Some applications have to do with defense ("defense" in a literal sense, not in the American sense in which "defense" is a euphemism for "war"). If you can focus a large amount of energy at one place in the atmosphere, you can use this energy to heat a column of air. Such a mechanism may be sufficient to disrupt the course of a ballistic missile.
Some applications have to do with offense. A powerful, focused, electromagnetic pulse can disrupt communications or disable a power grid. Some applications may be oriented towards the weaponization of space.
Beyond the twisted irony in the doublespeak of the word "remediation" in this case, I find it extremely troubling the extent to which persons in my government are willing to turn EVERYTHING AROUND ME into a weapon.
Does anybody know who these people are and why they should be trusted? Do they really know what their experiments are doing to our planet?
Monday, June 04, 2007
Surveillance Society for Fun and Profit
I'm looking at this satellite image from Google of the US Embassy in Baghdad, and it occurs to me this world must be totally mad. 8-year-olds have access to technologies that, 50 years ago, only the CIA had.
I call up D to express my utter amazement at the state of affairs here in this Earth-World, and he replies quite casually that it's because the people in charge fear no man or woman.
What will you, human, be able to do in 50 years with your computer? This is a good question to ask when you wish to consider what your government can do with their computers today.
Consider street-level surveillance. The new Google Street View is provoking all sorts of reactions, ranging from fascination with the new feature's novelty to outrage at the new feature's intrusiveness. The ability of governments to surveil citizens at the street-level far surpasses what is offered by Google Street View.
Imagine typing any person's name into a database, and automatically being able to watch him or her everywhere he or she goes. All those private surveillance cameras everywhere - in ATMs, in stores, in bars and resturaunts - are not so private. All electronic devices give off electromagnetic radiation that can be detected and decoded. All those private surveillance cameras are really un-secure wireless cameras. It is possibe to geolocate an individual camera based on slight differences in the time at which its signal is detected at different locations. This geolocation information can be correlated with the GPS data transmitted by your cellphone tracking device.
Whether a scheme like this is currently in use or not, it is not far-fetched. Authoritarian regimes have an interest in making the populace at all times aware of the possibility of surveillance. If nothing else, this makes the populace more likely to self-censor.
Of course, many people are not too worried about the threat of constant surveillance. Many people break no laws. This is fine.
But if we are, in fact, watched so closely, it is because we are managed like cattle.
I call up D to express my utter amazement at the state of affairs here in this Earth-World, and he replies quite casually that it's because the people in charge fear no man or woman.
What will you, human, be able to do in 50 years with your computer? This is a good question to ask when you wish to consider what your government can do with their computers today.
Consider street-level surveillance. The new Google Street View is provoking all sorts of reactions, ranging from fascination with the new feature's novelty to outrage at the new feature's intrusiveness. The ability of governments to surveil citizens at the street-level far surpasses what is offered by Google Street View.
Imagine typing any person's name into a database, and automatically being able to watch him or her everywhere he or she goes. All those private surveillance cameras everywhere - in ATMs, in stores, in bars and resturaunts - are not so private. All electronic devices give off electromagnetic radiation that can be detected and decoded. All those private surveillance cameras are really un-secure wireless cameras. It is possibe to geolocate an individual camera based on slight differences in the time at which its signal is detected at different locations. This geolocation information can be correlated with the GPS data transmitted by your cellphone tracking device.
Whether a scheme like this is currently in use or not, it is not far-fetched. Authoritarian regimes have an interest in making the populace at all times aware of the possibility of surveillance. If nothing else, this makes the populace more likely to self-censor.
Of course, many people are not too worried about the threat of constant surveillance. Many people break no laws. This is fine.
But if we are, in fact, watched so closely, it is because we are managed like cattle.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Who is Being Brainwashed?
Regarding recent articles on government "mind control" in The Washington Post and on Wired:
An important area of operation for contemporary intelligence gathering agencies is data aggregation: collecting information from multiple sources and creating meaningful connections between these disparate sources of information. Increasingly, this is being carried out by government agencies with the cooperation or coercion of private infrastructure. The intrusion of military intelligence operations into the private sector is especially troubling because it represents the ability, facilitated by the Web, to not only appropriate private citizens and organizations into a federal intelligence infrastructure, but also to manipulate these individuals and organizations for obscure motives (given our present state of government secrecy).
Consider the potential of combining the functionality of MySpace with that of Google, if the actions of users are mapped to a set of IP addresses or a MAC address:
The value of MySpace for intelligence purposes extends beyond the content of individual postings or personal data stored in a user’s profile. Every time a MySpace user does or does not click on a MySpace porn bot's solicitation, the result of that user’s decision is recorded. The way in which users respond to eachother’s social cues, the way blog posts are categorized, and the frequency or methodology with which one seeks to extend one’s social cluster are not only recorded, but furthermore represent a psychological model of that individual user.
Google also keeps track of user behavior. This data, which is recorded for advertising purposes, can be used to reveal word-by-word accounts of how users view language, associate specific terms, and, in a sense, what users are thinking about.
If intelligence agencies have access to user logs for both MySpace and Google, they have, on the one hand, a psychological model to describe an individual, and on the other hand, a semantic database to explain that individual's decision-making. This information could be combined to not only predict how individuals will respond to various stimuli, but to provide stimuli whereby certain behaviors are likely to be provoked. Such a semantic-behavior model could be tested by inserting specific search results into a list returned by Google and recording if and how a user responds.
Other, more direct methods of manipulating individuals have been investigated. Several recent patents issued to Hendricus Loos discuss a variety of ways in which, for example, the electromagnetic radiation emitted by cathode ray tube monitors can be used to manipulate an individual’s central nervous system.
Beyond the potential for illegal government experimentation or sadistic behavior on the part of rogue contractors, the proliferation of these technologies and the diffusion of these abilities into private hands will present to law enforcement a new and serious challenge. Frightened governments, faced with a problem which they have no idea how to detect or mitigate, may be part of the reason why people complaining of “mind control” are actively marginalized.
It would seem that governments concerned with serving the interests of their citizens would want to halt such research, assess the state of things, and begin to make disclosures. How can citizens ensure that their interests are being served if they cannot discuss the actions of their own government?
An important area of operation for contemporary intelligence gathering agencies is data aggregation: collecting information from multiple sources and creating meaningful connections between these disparate sources of information. Increasingly, this is being carried out by government agencies with the cooperation or coercion of private infrastructure. The intrusion of military intelligence operations into the private sector is especially troubling because it represents the ability, facilitated by the Web, to not only appropriate private citizens and organizations into a federal intelligence infrastructure, but also to manipulate these individuals and organizations for obscure motives (given our present state of government secrecy).
Consider the potential of combining the functionality of MySpace with that of Google, if the actions of users are mapped to a set of IP addresses or a MAC address:
The value of MySpace for intelligence purposes extends beyond the content of individual postings or personal data stored in a user’s profile. Every time a MySpace user does or does not click on a MySpace porn bot's solicitation, the result of that user’s decision is recorded. The way in which users respond to eachother’s social cues, the way blog posts are categorized, and the frequency or methodology with which one seeks to extend one’s social cluster are not only recorded, but furthermore represent a psychological model of that individual user.
Google also keeps track of user behavior. This data, which is recorded for advertising purposes, can be used to reveal word-by-word accounts of how users view language, associate specific terms, and, in a sense, what users are thinking about.
If intelligence agencies have access to user logs for both MySpace and Google, they have, on the one hand, a psychological model to describe an individual, and on the other hand, a semantic database to explain that individual's decision-making. This information could be combined to not only predict how individuals will respond to various stimuli, but to provide stimuli whereby certain behaviors are likely to be provoked. Such a semantic-behavior model could be tested by inserting specific search results into a list returned by Google and recording if and how a user responds.
Other, more direct methods of manipulating individuals have been investigated. Several recent patents issued to Hendricus Loos discuss a variety of ways in which, for example, the electromagnetic radiation emitted by cathode ray tube monitors can be used to manipulate an individual’s central nervous system.
Beyond the potential for illegal government experimentation or sadistic behavior on the part of rogue contractors, the proliferation of these technologies and the diffusion of these abilities into private hands will present to law enforcement a new and serious challenge. Frightened governments, faced with a problem which they have no idea how to detect or mitigate, may be part of the reason why people complaining of “mind control” are actively marginalized.
It would seem that governments concerned with serving the interests of their citizens would want to halt such research, assess the state of things, and begin to make disclosures. How can citizens ensure that their interests are being served if they cannot discuss the actions of their own government?
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Privacy, Surveillance, and Consumerism
The degree to which surveillance legislation and Internet advertising practices reach into the personal lives of Internet users is illustrated by www.aolstalker.com. These methods of producing, gathering, and disseminating information have rapidly become both pervasive and expensive. This cost is being subsidized by taxpayers and consumers, and the practices responsible for this cost are being propagated by legislators and advertisers at a time when our society lacks equally pervasive cultural idioms with which to meaningfully evaluate the philosophical, anthropological, and practical implications of these practices.
AOLstalker is a database of search queries conducted by AOL users. The information is organized according to which individual AOL users conducted various searches, and was collected between March 1, 2006 and May 31, 2006. Although the database was assembled for advertising purposes, AOLstalker appears to be an entertainment-oriented application of the data, and users of the site are encouraged to judge AOL users based on the humorousness of personal information revealed by the collected search queries.
The research that produced the database was conducted by AOL and Google, and released publicly. Derivative research has been conducted by authors Pass, Chowdhury and Torgeson, published as "A Picture of Search" for The First International Conference on Scalable Information Systems.
I happened upon AOLstalker after receiving a strange error message on MySpace. The error message included the domain name collect.myspace.com, which I did not recognize, and for which I subsequently performed a Google search. I received a result titled "Stalking users who searched for collect myspace com" at 2006-05-29 21:43:43, referencing the page:
www.aolstalker.com/search.php?q=collect.myspace.com
This got me thinking about users who search for their own names, for various facts about their city or neighborhood, their family or friends, their financial institutions... all the personally-identifiable data revealed by user searches. Beyond the voyeuristic appeal of the intimate psychological portraits AOLstalker offers users, the AOLstalker database also represents a serious privacy and security issue. Were malicious coders able to exploit existing social networking systems like MySpace through phishing schemes or system hacks, a similar "live" database could prove just as lucrative to cybercriminals and authoritarians as it has proven to advertisers.
It is my hypothesis that there, in fact, exists somewhere a "live" version of the aolstalker database, which is tied to a bit of malicious code (or possibly even plain text that has been properly formatted) in MySpace. This code, I suspect, is propagated by third parties who trick MySpace users into posting the malicious code online.
Finally, I suspect, that some targets of the "live" MySpace version of AOLstalker have been victimized by users who treated the "live" database as a form of interactive entertainment, possibly accounting for some recent Internet postings about "gang stalking."
If aolstalker is driven by information that was "publicly" available, I think Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment provides a relatively straightforward illustration of why one should feel disconcerted by intelligence applications of similar technology such as the Intellipedia.
If our Democracy is to survive and thrive in peace, we must have ways to engage in meaningful discourse about the surveillance society in all its forms.
AOLstalker is a database of search queries conducted by AOL users. The information is organized according to which individual AOL users conducted various searches, and was collected between March 1, 2006 and May 31, 2006. Although the database was assembled for advertising purposes, AOLstalker appears to be an entertainment-oriented application of the data, and users of the site are encouraged to judge AOL users based on the humorousness of personal information revealed by the collected search queries.
The research that produced the database was conducted by AOL and Google, and released publicly. Derivative research has been conducted by authors Pass, Chowdhury and Torgeson, published as "A Picture of Search" for The First International Conference on Scalable Information Systems.
I happened upon AOLstalker after receiving a strange error message on MySpace. The error message included the domain name collect.myspace.com, which I did not recognize, and for which I subsequently performed a Google search. I received a result titled "Stalking users who searched for collect myspace com" at 2006-05-29 21:43:43, referencing the page:
www.aolstalker.com/search.php?q=collect.myspace.com
This got me thinking about users who search for their own names, for various facts about their city or neighborhood, their family or friends, their financial institutions... all the personally-identifiable data revealed by user searches. Beyond the voyeuristic appeal of the intimate psychological portraits AOLstalker offers users, the AOLstalker database also represents a serious privacy and security issue. Were malicious coders able to exploit existing social networking systems like MySpace through phishing schemes or system hacks, a similar "live" database could prove just as lucrative to cybercriminals and authoritarians as it has proven to advertisers.
It is my hypothesis that there, in fact, exists somewhere a "live" version of the aolstalker database, which is tied to a bit of malicious code (or possibly even plain text that has been properly formatted) in MySpace. This code, I suspect, is propagated by third parties who trick MySpace users into posting the malicious code online.
Finally, I suspect, that some targets of the "live" MySpace version of AOLstalker have been victimized by users who treated the "live" database as a form of interactive entertainment, possibly accounting for some recent Internet postings about "gang stalking."
If aolstalker is driven by information that was "publicly" available, I think Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment provides a relatively straightforward illustration of why one should feel disconcerted by intelligence applications of similar technology such as the Intellipedia.
If our Democracy is to survive and thrive in peace, we must have ways to engage in meaningful discourse about the surveillance society in all its forms.
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