Re: The DATA Act, Department of the Treasury, and Machine Learning Technologies

Gannon,


Those are interesting points, and concerns, in particular with the news climate, the zeitgeist.  We’re all reading the same news stories, scientists and technologists are all reading the same subsets of technology-related news stories.

  

A growing number of scientists, linguists, are concerned about low-content, high-context signals, figurative tweets, in public science forums.  Coincidentally, the NSA is one of a number of employers of linguists and computational linguists.

 

Reasons for concerns include scientists, intellectuals, who desire to express substantive and important ideas to one another while themselves concerned, including for funding-related reasons, that a government is watching.  Other overarching concerns include American scientists and intellectuals encountering, directly or indirectly, content which conveys or implies the whims or opinions of foreign governments, governments which the American scientists and intellectuals did not participate in the elections of and have no obligation whatsoever to consider the opinions or whims of.

 



We can poll participants at the W3C, for instance, (a) have you ever encountered information about the opinions of a domestic or foreign government object about a technology topic, (b) have you received literature from any party, are you aware of literature from any party, about the relationships between the men and women of one land and their government and the governments of other lands, governments which individuals did not participate in the elections of, during group decision making processes? (c) In which roles do you consider which Americans as having a role-based responsibility to hear or to consider the opinions of domestic or foreign governments?


The contents of rational argumentation, however, are valid or invalid without regard to the speaker.  James Madison’s theses, for instance, would have been just as reasonable if voiced by one of his contemporaries.





Today, in the United States, the nature of the risks that some Americans may perceive with regard to exercising free speech ought be a concern to all Americans.


Linguists and computational linguists have reason to hypothesize that linguistic phenomenon have occurred in public forums, new forums utilizing new technologies, concurrent to recent political climates, concurrent to news climates which indicate to individuals that they are being watched by faceless government personnel, or “spooks”.  If the topic is interesting to you, I can detail some linguistics and literary topics.


Some of the contemporary societal and political topics trace at least as far back as the Odyssey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey), the Cyclops, a monster evocative of a big watchful eye, and Polyphemus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphemus, Πολύφημος) meaning “much spoken of” or “famous”, the much spoken of big watchful eye.  There was also Panoptes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoptes, Πανόπτης), "the all-seeing", and from Panoptes is the word panopticon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon).

 

It can be extrapolated, then, that some elements of statecraft, some topics of contemporary American concern, trace back to before 20th century fascism and the dystopian science fiction of George Orwell to ancient civilizations.  New topics include the Internet and the Web.


If some government organizations have infiltrated public scientific forums, on the Internet, on the Web, we can comment that their American neighbors can identify a growing number of domestic and foreign intelligence and military tactics, antics, shenanigans, guff, as they are occurring, including disruption.


You can make use of FOIA to obtain that literature, literature including which cybertactical topics that your policymakers deemed acceptable to be considered by enlisted Americans.  The NSA headquarters building houses three organizations and one is a military cybertactical command center, the U.S. Cyber Command.  I’ve commented previously that their web domain should be .mil, nsa.mil .


If the recent NSA news is interesting to you and if “walled gardens” are interesting to you, you can utilize FOIA to request more information about the history of the NSA, the history of the NSA and AOL, the history of the NSA in the 1980’s, and you can read that “walled gardens” existed before some modern websites.


There might someday exist, from computational linguistics, a free speech index, for instance utilizing data from the blogosphere.  Such a metric could measure the future’s historical archived materials as well.  Until objective scientific metrics exist, the topics can be phrased as subjective societal concerns, civics concerns, in particular with the contemporary news zeitgeist.  Anecdotally, for those who enjoy literature, a literary question is whether some tellings of The Odyssey resembled, thematically, Hogan’s Heroes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan's_Heroes).


 

Summarily, the privacy concerns that you have mentioned happen to have a news climate backdrop pertaining to a few government programs, a few controversial government programs of a few controversial government organizations in the national security apparatus, a few organizations of a much larger multi-scale government, city, state and federal government.  The government employs a large number of Americans, law-abiding Americans, law-abiding Americans who want to use computers to do their jobs better and in more cost-effective ways.


I wanted to support your freedom to express concerns about big data and the government, and American privacy, you’re reading the same news stories as the rest of us.  A number of us are putting in extra effort to ensure that the concerns of the American people with regard to the United States government are addressed as we scientists and technologists, experts, at the W3C and elsewhere, facilitate the advantages of computerization, vis a vis government modernizations, for the United States of America and the American people.


Rest assured.




Kind regards,


Adam Sobieski