Incendiary Words

Smart Planet comes through again, this time with a post titled Top Keywords that Homeland security use to spy on you.

Words including “dirty bomb”, “grid”, “epidemic” and “cops” are among hundreds of flagged words that are contained in the 39-page booklet (.pdf).

Recently released following a request under the Freedom of Information Act through a request from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the DHS’ National Operations Center (NOC) use the 2011 Analyst’s Desktop Binder as a guide to what may be considered a “threat” online.

Social media networks, including Twitter and Facebook, are watched in order to potentially weed out threats to the United States but to also monitor any commentary which may “reflect adversely” on the DHS or its “response activities”, according to the guide. Other words include:

Airport

Blizzard

Cancelled

Cops

Crash

Earthquake

El Paso

Exercise

Flood

Flu

Law enforcement

Terror

Pork

Sarin

Obviously, neural nets are being use here to the extreme. The problem with using this tech lies in the difficulty of extracting the real meaning of these words when used in context, a goodly portion of which we all have said in conversations with others from time to time, either face to face or in blogs, emails, phone calls or social sites, the primary places where surveillance of this type takes place. Without question, we are being surveilled against but, as often stated in BRT, this type of 24/7 surveillance should be universal and applicable to all, not just reserved for agencies like Homeland Security, an agency who's unfortunate title uncomfortably reminds one of repressive regimes like Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and North Korea.