cogito

If you’re visiting from my other blog, Putting the Action in Distraction, welcome! It’s been a while since I updated this blog, so I thought I’d put together a little round-up of the most popular entries for your quick perusal.

• Truth & Hypocrisy: The first entry on this blog, and a sort of introduction to what it’s all about: truth.
• The Sharlet Letter: This was a response to an article by Jeff Sharlet (of The Revealer) in Rolling Stone about “modern” Christianity and sexual purity.
• Most Chastity vs. Sharletry: A follow-up article to The Sharlet Letter based on comments I received.
• The Big Bang & Blind Faith: With the increased attack on faith on the Internet, I thought it was time I wrote something illustrating the significant scientific and metaphysical problems with the “Big Bang.”
• A collection of quotes from scientists who indicate they recognize inexplicable design in nature.
• Theology vs. The Bible: Joshua Duncan wrote an article arguing against the idea of simply being a “Biblicist.” He claims that one must adopt a particular “Theology” (in his case, Calvinism) to make one’s stance clear. I disagree.

Enjoy, and as always, discussion is encouraged!

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I looked at my site stats this morning, and continued clicking refresh through lunchtime absolutely baffled as to why my traffic had increased so much. Typically I would just look at my referrer log and that would answer the question; however, today it was a long list of visitors referred from:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http%3A%2F%2Fjacobmorse.blogspot.com.

I thought, surely, there aren’t thousands of people typing my address directly into Google to get here, so I was left confused.

I posted an entry a short while ago asking “where are you all coming from?!” and two kind readers said “You’re a Blogger.com Blog of Note!” Oh. That explains it. Thanks Blogger, and thanks for stopping by!

The most popular article on this blog - by far - is What Would Orwell Do?, an investigative essay about Facebook and its investor’s ties to the CIA.

Also, check out my other blog, VIA CRUCIS.

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Man, have I been on a conspiracy kick lately. Timing is strange. I published my exposé on Facebook, then it broke that the NSA was spying with no balance of power. Since then it has been one thing after another, making my first few entries on this blog all about possible conspiracies.

Well, today a couple of interesting tid-bits hit the web.

1. Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists:

Amazon wishlists lets anyone bookmark books for later purchase. By default these lists are public and available to anybody who searches by name. If the wishlist creator specifies a shipping address, someone else can even purchase the book on Amazon and have it shipped directly as a gift. The wishlist creator’s city and state are made public on the wishlist, but the street address remains private. Amazon’s popularity has created a vast database of wishlists. No index of all wishlists is available, but it remains possible to view all wishlists by people of a particular first name. A recent search for people named Mark returned 124,887 publicly viewable wishlists.

For an all inclusive search by name, you could compile a comprehensive list of first names and nicknames from the baby names databases available on the internet. Armed with this list, and by recording the search results for each first name, it is possible for you to retrieve the vast majority of public wishlists on Amazon.

2. Trent Lapinksi’s ‘MySpace Report’, a culmination of various research he’s been doing to answer the question “Who is running MySpace?”. See also, The Truth about MySpace and Why Doesn’t Anyone Ask Who Actually Runs MySpace?. Apparently Trent has been threatened with legal action in response to his snooping.

I know the site was bought by Fox, but Fox didn’t start the site, plus much of the original staff still appears to be employed. For reasons unknown, no one seems to ask who Tom Anderson is, and most of all no one asks who Chris DeWolfe is (MySpace’s CEO). When I looked into who these guys pasts I found a web of issues ranging from rumors of running porn websites to possible connections to investment fraud. When I simply asked MySpace about these allegations they threatened to sue me.

MySpace is now just over 2 years old and is one of the biggest websites on the internet yet no one knows where or how it came to be. Isn’t it of millions of people’s concern to know who runs the website they confide so much in? Why hasn’t the media or blogosphere asked this question?

This brings me full circle to the problem I see with Facebook and its eerie “privacy” policy. People sign up for things because they are fun and free and never think twice to read the fine print. At best, you’re providing information that can be sold and you might run into a spam problem. Worse, you’re voluntarily indexing your interests and contacts for the easy perusal of security agencies (or, anyone else that is interested).

On that note, I have had a lot of comments and e-mails saying “Who cares?” or “Facebook is just your favorite music!” That simply isn’t true. Facebook has already been used to arrest students for questionable behavior at some colleges. Perhaps most useful to security agencies are the “Party” and “Event” planning features in Facebook. This keeps a calendar of events, linked to all students who have RSVP’d. Many of these events are political in nature (click here for an example).

That said, government spying and data mining will ultimately only affect those who are “up to no good.” But is that the point? How free are we if we are constantly being watched? Not only that, but once we accept surveillance as normal, where will the slippery slope carry us?

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Well, I garnered quite a bit of traffic from my post about Facebook and its possible CIA ties. Thanks to everyone who linked, particularly Andy over at Waxy.org!

I just recently started thinking about the Internet, its conception and its future, and it really is a bit of a conundrum. As reader Kenneth pointed out:

It’s like anything that you have large quantities of information for, whether it be baseball (Moneyball), the weather or Google. It is being recorded and it will both benefit us as a society (Fun tools like the Facebook and easy access to information like Google) and hurt us (Release of Privacy - What we search for in private).

I don’t know whether Facbook’s “connections” to the CIA are relevant. As many bloggers pointed out, the CIA could spider these databases if they wanted to, regardless of any monetary investment. What I do know - and the overall purpose for the article - is that we are at a critical point in history. We have the technological facility to index all known information, and this ability provides us with unprecedented convenience. What we must think long and hard about is the cost of that convenience. Where is the balance? How transparent do we want our personal lives to be in exchange for networking, indexing and searchability? I don’t know the answers, but we are the generation(s) that must come to terms with this issue and make some decisions.

That said, there have been some very interesting links in the past few days that correspond with my concerns. Here’s a quick “round-up”:

1. Apparently President Bush authorized the NSA to do some domestic spying without warrants following the September 11 attacks. (Google News - Forbes)

The New York Times quotes government sources as saying a presidential order signed in 2002 allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity — without court-approved warrants. Perhaps thousands of international telephone calls and e-mails were monitored, the Times said.

The Times said the decision to conduct surveillance without a court order within the United States represented a major shift in domestic intelligence gathering.

2. On a humorous (but in the context, ominous) note, heres an interview with Google’s Larry Page in 2038.

Q: I would like to talk a bit about Google Real World Texts Search, the former Google Books Search. When did you decide it wasn’t enough to just scan books?

A: Well, just look at our mission statement. You’ve heard it a million times, “Google’s mission is to organize the universe’s information … “ etc. After we finished scanning the last book, we were sort of like: “Wow. We did it. Everyone thought it’d be impossible.” But we’re not here to tap each other’s backs and sip champaign. For us it’s more like, so where’s the missing data? And really, we think there’s a lot of text outside of books. On product packaging, comic books, magazines, school papers, and so on. Even when you’re doing a phone scribble, that has the potential to contain valuable information to some. So really, it was only a matter of getting this right, technically, … we knew very soon we just had to do it.

Q: The phone scribble scanning raised some privacy issues.

A: Yes. And we don’t take those lightly. Internally, we repeat our mantra, discuss it… “Do no evil”. But really, people can easily exclude their trash from being indexed. Our Googlebots will not scan any house, trash can, letter, postcard, magazine or anything else marked with the “no index” sticker. This is really important to us, that people get the chance to opt-out if they’re concerned with privacy.

The rest is worth a read.

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