Fiction Imitates Truth 1
It would seem that the TV show Person of Interest, positing a giant surveillance computer tracking us all, is not all that far off the mark. The computer, though, is not called “Sibilance,” it’s called “Stellar Wind”:
From Raw Story:
The gigantic building is set to cost $2bn and be up and running by 2013.
It is being designed to store huge amounts of accessible web information – such as social media updates – but also information in the “deep web” behind passwords and other firewalls that keep it away from the public.
As an example of Stellar Wind’s power, Binney believes it is hoovering up virtually every email sent by every American and perhaps a good deal of the people of the rest of the world, too.
“I didn’t expect it from my government. I thought we were the good guys. We wear white hats, right?” he said.
Read the rest.
September 17, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Not so secret anymore, although they deny it all the time. Tim Weiner’s history of the FBI — he’s a NYT reporter — published earlier this year talks about the agency using Stellar Wind during the Bush years for domestic terrorism surveillance. It makes sense looking at it from the outside. The FBI netted a lot of patsies and it seemed not all of them could have been snared by tipsters. It has seemed fairly obvious to me they monitor a lot of communications, from the web to e-mail to telephones and then, when they have a lead, they activate an informant, usually someone with a record who’s angling for leniency, and the informant starts buddying around with the suspects caught in the initial surveillance.