themeek

Sorry, I don't follow. Could you unpack this?

True. Good point. Though I think the implication here would be that the company in question is both domestic and not associated with said overseas groups. This would mean that, (without a warrant) the executive of the US government is performing searches of domestic data.

Again that isn't anything new - although still profound.

Thank you.

Your link to the blog is broken (the href is missing an '=').

Unfortunately no new information for those following the threads. Are there any plans to release more details (links, logs) publicly?

The reason here would be due to the implication the CIA may be involved. The CIA's charter (is supposed to) specifically prohibit domestic activity.

Facebook is in PRISM and a myriad of other government programs - everything that is posted, uploaded or chatted there is tagged, filtered and alerted for activity that the US government may deem dangerous or may want to pursue for other reasons (DEA, aggregate understanding and persuasion/'engagement').

Agreed broadly that this wouldn't be completely new news (were it to be confirmed). Technical details and confirmation do help citizens to understand that surveillance/'bulk collection' is alive and well.

Nope. :)

Thank you for the links.

Thank you for replying with some more information regarding steps to verify your employment with Facebook.

Is there a legal or transparency document that you can link so that we can understand what information you are able to share?

Thank you for replying here.

Can you give us more information including:

- Proof you are from Recorded Future

- The public URL at which you picked up the links

- Any evidence you have that what you say happened indeed happened? That is specifically the log information you report on having investigated. Publishing this will allow the original publisher and independent analysis to corroborate your story.

The more information you can publish to quell any doubts, if this is completely benign, the better for your company/Facebook/CIA.

Thank you for contributing to the thread.

I have had a lot of difficulty in the past discussing security and privacy concerns with your team - in particular a complain about the censorship of my linking leaked Snowden and Wikileaks documents and PDF scans of Islamic Extremist magazines (non-violent/gross content).

Do you have a transparency document anywhere that you can link, so that we can understand what you as a representative can and will contribute to the conversation? Could you also provide some proof that you are a representative of Facebook security?

Thank you again for your time.

> 3,000 times less than the sunlight that physically hits the earth daily

This one.

(I can not edit the comment, but wanted to include Nicholas Carr on the list).

I didn't catch any references to the Beats and have not read Howl (my Beat generation is weak - could only ever get into small amounts of Boroughs and smaller amounts of Kerouac) - but otherwise yes and I would say I'm surprised Postman and Mumford, and maybe even Kaczynski, somehow didn't make the cut; and of course the constellation of other notables who have contributed to the sphere of ideas. It is difficult to define a surface area to this large volume, but if I were to suggest a few I would also add the Extended Mind Thesis and Nudge (or something like it).

Certainly. Take the Pew Research study on news media trends [1]. The majority of younger people are getting their news primarily or entirely from Facebook and Twitter - both of which have algorithms that decide and organize which news and information should populate each stream. What's worse is that these algorithms are not only private, and difficult to understand in their ancillary affects, but also they are controlled by parties whose incentives are not in line with providing people with the information that helps them to be the most informed; and in fact what's worse is both Facebook and Twitter are major stages for both state sponsored and funded propaganda and PR campaigns.

Beyond this, Google, Bing, Baidu and other search engines can not on principle provide links to news on regular search terms, as people do not and can not know what news has happened to search without first being introduced to it. In both search and news aggregation, these search algorithms prioritize items according to profiles they believe match the underlying personalities performing the search. First, the same fundamental problems are present in this search aggregation - studies have been done by governments on reordering search terms to get elections and population affects they desire (and wide scale search engine manipulation has been seen in at least one national election in India) and that for search engines the customer is not the person searching but the PR firms and advertizers who pay to use the searcher's screen real estate establishing incentives which if not wrong on their face are askew and should call for transparency.

Now, this is before other effects are taken into consideration. Presuming aggregation were neither malicious, political or gamed by SEO and that somehow this aggregation is done in a way tailored only to the expectations and demands of the consuming entity. There exists what people call an 'information bubble' of the sort Pynchon predicted I had quoted - where the availability of the information in theory is overshadowed by the immediacy and digestibility of the information that is familiar. And in fact, however anecdotal this may seem, this is my experience with myself and the people who I know. Effort beyond merely searching for new information must be sought. An imaginary and completely invented scenario is as follows: Some scandal happens within government and from outside the internet a left leaning young person hears about it. When they perform a search to get more information about this scandal they will almost certainly be presented - by a 'well working' algorithm - a left leaning perspective on that event aimed towards a young audience cruely devoid of evidence that perspectives from the right, the middle, the top, the bottom, other countries, older people, etc even exist.

Adversarial case aside (e.g. United States Special Forces are known to purposefully surround the media consumption of adversaries and their families in crafted information bubbles to break their faith and ideologies), and poor incentive structure aside (e.g. Digg) there are significant challenges faced by the paternalistic arrangement of algorithmic management not the least of which is knowing the 'ground truth' (a term scientists use to refer to the ideal objective result from an intelligence algorithm) and how far a complicated algorithm is from reaching it.

I tend to wax and wane, but I guess that's what you asked for. :P

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-m...

This is a fascinating piece - especially concerning Pynchon's coverage of the class warfare aspect to machinery-as-capital.

My favorite parts:

- His treatment of Luddism as class warfare; a recognition that the access to the means of production by the machines paired with their replacement and downward pressure on individual wages concentrates power. We have (had?) a myth that the internet would be 'democratizing' in its power, but it's gone much the same way toward concentration.

- Pynchon eerily predicts biological sciences, AI and robotics starting to converge and how it will catch us flat footed - and already we are seeing the emergence of extremely rough AIs contain people in information bubbles.

- Pynchon spells the paradox of deluge of information available to us so very well; while we might think that anyone can become an expert in anything the opportunity cost and the amount of information immediately relevant to our fields isolates us from being broad renaissance men.

Gravity's Rainbow was more than a pleasure. I wish Pynchon had written more of these short critical lens essays.

Wait. Hasn't the concept of encryption entered mass consumer consciousness (my grandparents have asked me about it) and have not horrifically damaging events occurred?

The United States hacks and counterattacks China all of the time.

The reason for calling the DPRK's attack on the propaganda creation of the State Department 'cyberterrorism' and 'cyberwar' is that it aligns with US foreign policy (SK's official policy now is to pursue reunification).

NK is going down - China is more complicated. We do hack and counterattack China though, all the time.

The SONY hack was almost assuredly NK or at the very least NK sympathizers. There are technical reasons (malware fingerprints, servers, tactical similarity to similar operations against SK media outlets). But the best way to link them is to see that the motivation was specifically anti-The Interview.

The important emails leaked by the Guardians of Peace (their 'Christmas Gift') show that CEO Lynton, a boardmember of the RAND Corporation, had been discussing with the State Department and RAND Corporation specialist on nuclear deterrence, NK and regime change since June the same year how the film should end and what was most likely to cause instability in NK when CSOs introduced them to the NK population.

That is to say The Interview was a 'diplomacy product' of the US government and the NK hacking of SONY was a retaliation for that - and in fact the cyber team retaliating against SONY specifically punishes media outlets for running adversarial messages about the Kim regime.

So the story here isn't that NK probably wasn't behind the attack - they probably were. The reason people are so skeptical is that they don't understand why NK would attack SONY, a movie seeming to be too petty a reason. It's easier to see when you read the leaked emails and ascertain that the US government was involved in crafting the film for its purposes.

There's a lot of toxic stuff in US foreign policy - and not just US but every nation. We believe in myths about our countries because they perform these actions in covert ways, and propel a lofty image of themselves in public interactions and through the media. The US does some very ugly, dirty stuff. But I take exception with some of the things in your list - specifically the characterization that the CIA's torture is or was somehow the 'most' brutal we've seen in modern times. That's some hyperbole and I think you know it. It may seems like picking on details but there is absolutely more heinous forms of torture (dissolving people in acid, using power tools to remove limbs and digits, etc) practiced at large in other nations.

But really the thing I want to leave here is that there is a tragedy at the commons. Torture and rendition, surveillance and propaganda, coups and proxy wars, theft and sabotage - all of these things are alive and well. The US is one of many nations involved in these activities as the planet races to establish water and food security before our planet exhales.