[ExI] Wikileaks.

[Darren Greer]

Anders wrote:

>No, nutters are common. It is just that most of they do not matter. (proud
recipient of two crazy missives today)<

Since 2001 it's been very difficult to determine who may be nutters and who
may not. Someone mentioned the likelihood of people on this group being on
enemy lists (can't find the post now but I know I read it.) I can say from
experience it doesn't take much to make them. After the U.S. invaded Iraq I
began writing some unflattering essays on U.S. foreign and domestic security
policy and published some of them in a book of essays released in 2005 in
Canada. It was then that I began to notice some unusual traffic on my .ca
website -- U.S. government agencies, including the FBI, were regularly
crawling it. Hardly anyone read or bought that book, but someone apparently
noticed it. I took the site down eventually.

A few years later when living in California I became friends with an
infamous gay pornographer who had been called by a Tuft's University
professor in a lecture on 21st century morality "the embodiment of the
post-human." Because of this friendship, I again went on the U.S.
intelligence radar. I am now the proud owner of an FBI file. I would not
even have known this much if I hadn't been introduced in San Francisco to an
ex-FBI agent who was a friend of a friend. I really don't understand the
world of intelligence and enemy lists and national security anyway. The
lines between what is considered subversive activity, and even thinking, and
what is civically acceptable are so blurred that the whole thing has become
one big, sinister mess.

It was easier in the old days, when you could be black-listed for carrying a
copy of Das Capital across the border but the kind of sex you preferred
would only affect your chances for getting elected to public office.


Darren


On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> Eugen Leitl wrote:
>
>>
>> It's pretty well known that TLAs do FOAF network clustering,
>> and of course if persecution level is dialed up sufficiently high
>> such lists act as a self denial of service, which would be self
>> defeating, unless you're into tabula rasa approaches a la
>> Mr. Dzhugashvili. And these typically take some setup time,
>> so there's plenty of warning.
>>
>>
>
> I wonder how sensitive these algorithms are to salting? Suppose each of us
> joins a randomly selected sinister group/mailinglist, or a random group in
> general, what would that do to the network clustering? From what I know of
> network clustering algorithms, this could mess up statistics with noise
> fairly well. Of course, TLAs and network sociologists are working on robust
> estimators and pattern finding. But even against robust algorithms, in some
> data mining domains it is known that an aware enemy can mess up
> classification (even when the algorithm is unknown).
>
> It is fun to run this kind of network analysis. One can use it against
> one's enemies too - I am somewhat worried about "DIY illuminati software"
> making it so easy to mine and attack social networks that we get a lot of
> social noise.
>
>
>  So apart from nutters, which are rare, I wouldn't worry too much
>>
>
> No, nutters are common. It is just that most of they do not matter. (proud
> recipient of two crazy missives today)
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg,
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>



-- 
"In the end that's all we have: our memories - electrochemical impulses
stored in eight pounds of tissue the consistency of cold porridge." -
Remembrance of the Daleks

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