To the ideals that established democracy, liberty and freedom- Happy Birthday America
Hope you still find some way to redeem the ideals you were based on this day.
Happy July the 4th, Ed Snowden.
Category: Internet
Happy Canada Day
a day to be thankful for a beautiful land, humble people and honorable places
NSA Interference in Open Source Projects #rstats #python
One key result of NSA’s influence in open source projects is the usage of sneakware in compliant packages, and frequent changes in dependencies (including huge amount of packages )to disrupt non-compliant packages. Basically this is of note to both Python and R communities as there is reason to believe that deprecations in packages due to changes in famous APIs like Twitter and Google are not without undue legalistic influence.
Do open source analytical tools represent a threat to the hegemony of Anglo Saxon Governments in text mining? Is there any evidence of anything here or are we just tin hat data scientists blogging to get extra views?
If Google can bend over, can Canonical, Microsoft, Red Hat be far behind?
Because it is Friday
and it was a good week for good people
Big Data : Building Big Brother’s Evil Empire
Background– The Russell–Einstein Manifesto was issued in London on July 9, 1955 by Bertrand Russell in the midst of the Cold War. It highlighted the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and called for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict. The signatories included eleven pre-eminent intellectuals and scientists, including Albert Einstein, who signed it just days before his death on April 18, 1955.
It is time Data Scientists most of whom have tacitly accepted that open source and open societies are movements for good, come together and stop enabling Big Brothers in China, India and United States from accumulating lifetimes of information on the citizens of the Internet. Does the 21st Century need a better equipped and enabled United Nations to deal with climate change, weather weapons and cyber warfare. While the myth of Anglo Saxon unipolar world is dead, renegade elements from the military industrial complex from both the West and East threaten the peace with illegal and unethical spying on citizens and civilians.
As data scientists, we enable them , these Governments with the new cyber nukes to collect, sort, aggregate, visualize , huge amounts of text data. I bet the NSA and China use Hadoop and R for purposes that are both repulsive and illegal. Now you can join the gravy train, and earn big money working for one, or the other, or even both.
Or we can come up with a newer version of Russell- Einstein manifesto for Big Data and Internet. The military industrial complex of the East and West has screwed the real planet enough. Why screw the cyber -world of Internet by these weapons of mass collection? Using Python, R, SAS, JMP, or using regression, k means, map reduce/. Data scientists should have a conscience before they fire their code.
Big Brother is watching you- George Orwell
Big Data is watching you- George Bush
How to help your government keep the world safe using statistics #rstats #python #sas
Big Data for Big Brother. Now playing. At a computer near you. How to help water the tree of liberty using statistics?
or
or use SAS software
SAS/CIA from the last paragraph of
Click to access ET_CD_Mumbai_Jul12.pdf
Thoughts on Guardian’s expose of US Govt Data Mining
I am writing this sitting in Canada, in a language given to me by my education and colonial history. Some of my best friends and mentors have been Americans, Europeans and Asians. I will try and state this as objectively as possible.
- If China’s government sees your data or even data of dissidents, it is considered bad, but if the US Government does it, it is considered okay. Is that really okay? I would trust the SCOTUS, the IRS, the Congress, but I am not sure I should trust the Pentagon, NSA and White House with zero restraints.
- In reality no human eye can see so much data. They have algorithms running for text mining, automated programs that enable human analysts to zoom in if required. The US government is not presumably interested in your dating life but the data is there.
- Economic Espionage has been a traditional tradecraft of Western policy since they borrowed gunpowder and silk from China, to Operation Paper Clip , giving Nazis pardons for US space programs.
- USA has a long tradition and policy of government and defense working with the private sector to give them economic advantages. Internet was released by Al Gore and DARPA.
- With the new challenges of climate change, economic rivalry, diminishing energy resources- should the US government be trusted with almost 80% of the data flowing through the English speaking Internet.
- The collection of data from non American citizens effectively makes this an undeclared cyber-war that the Obama government is waging against the world.
- If Albert Einstein could protest nuclear weapons 60 years ago, as data scientists it is our community’s duty to clear the rules of engagement of data collection and data mining. Before we get into one more cyber cold war.
I am disappointed with Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple for not even once protesting this move.
I would also like to know what is the expense in past 7 years of this monitoring and how many threats were neutralized (and why the Boston Bombers and others could not be)
I would like to know if data belonging to members of the US Congress was collected or purged by the records from the NSA or if there are any exclusion criterion for people or was data collected for everybody
Read more here- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data
To my intense horror, it seems Julian Assange was right about Eric Schmidt.
There are NO ways of making money that are NOT evil.
