Attack of the cretins.

[Matthew X]

[Oracle Corp Chairman and CEO] Larry Ellison wants to sell databases, 
correct? So maybe now we can have everybody's fingerprints and retinal 
scans put into computers. And Big Brother can be efficient with Oracle 
software. Siebel [Systems] has purchased the world's largest American flag 
and attached it to the side of their building, supposedly to symbolize 
growth. Of course, that might imply their company's growth. That is, if you 
want to invest now, it's a good chance to get in at a low price.
On the political side, you see Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and talking 
about God punishing us. The cretins are coming out of the woodwork,
The "Office of Homeland Security" does sound a little over the top
It sounds like a phrase out of Orwell's 1984. It's scary as hell.
One of the things I don't think Bush gets is that the terrorists win if 
they take away our freedoms, directly or indirectly.
“Yesterday’s Technology Tomorrow”—the phrase has been thrown around the FBI 
for decades. It might be funny if it weren’t so true. “The agents have 
encrypted radio; they’ve got night vision; they’ve got the surveillance 
stuff,” says a former agent, one of several interviewed for this piece. 
“They have top of the line everything—everything except information 
technology.”
Not to dwell too much on Sun’s Scott McNealy, but he did popularize the 
phrase “The network is the computer.” This idea, which the Fortune 500 
started grasping five years ago, is as anti-stovepipe as you can get. It 
sees individual computers as communication devices, whose ability to link 
up with the rest of the world’s computers is more important than the 
processing power they possess on their own. It sees the network as a 
platform on which knowledge can be shared, amplified and re-created in new 
innovative forms, the networked pieces adding up to far more than the sum 
of their parts.
Victory in the information war depends on the ability to use that 
information—to understand it, to react to it quickly. “September 11 was all 
based on controlling information,” says Carver Mead, the CalTech physicist, 
one of the fathers of the microprocessor and a pioneer in neural 
networking, an approach to artificial intelligence based on replicating the 
connective miracles of the human brain. “The fact is the hijackers 
controlled all the information. They had all the information on the first 
three planes—they were the only ones who knew what was going to happen. On 
the fourth plane, there was a tiny amount of information available to the 
passengers; they were able to use it to thwart the plan.
“We actually knew a lot about some of these people,” says Mead. “We 
actually did know a lot, but we didn’t put it together.”
Putting it together requires acceptance of the idea that the network is the 
computer–and that the bigger and broader it is, the better.
a fit-for-the-1990s computer system will be in place at the agency by the 
end of 2003 I PROMIS you.The FBI’s controversial Carnivore system, which 
can read e-mail and track suspects’ Web activity, reportedly has a data 
mining component called Coolmine to help it analyze the information. But 
for most of Uncle Sam’s security-related data, mining is something done by 
keyboard- and hunch-wielding humans, by hand.

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