This really made me shake my head.
Homeland Security released a list of words that, if used in Social Media, make result in the monitoring of social media activity for terrorist tendencies or threats against the country.
The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as ‘attack’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘dirty bomb’ alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like ‘pork’, ‘cloud’, ‘team’ and ‘Mexico’.
Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats.
The list has been posted online by the Electronic Privacy Information Center – a privacy watchdog group who filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act before suing to obtain the release of the documents.
In a letter to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counter-terrorism and Intelligence, the centre described the choice of words as ‘broad, vague and ambiguous’
A senior Homeland Security official who spoke to The Huffington Post on Friday on condition of anonymity said the testimony of agency officials last week remains “accurate” and the manual “is a starting point, not the endgame” in maintaining situational awareness of natural and man-made threats. The official denied Electronic Privacy Information Center’s charge that the government is monitoring dissent.
Oh, guess that’s why I did not see the phrase “impending Civil War.”
Being the scamp that I am, I’d suggest everyone who uses this pernicious ‘Social Media’ (I haven’t yet submitted to our police state overlords) to grab the list and create an endless chain of texts drawn from it. Maybe some enterprising geek could develop and app to randomly create messages from the list??
That reminds me of Myron, the Gore Vidal novel where Vidal substitutes very good words (the names of the Supreme Court Justices) for very bad words in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling on pornography. We can just substitute the appropriate words: Bush for dirty bomb; Cheney for terrorism; Al Gore for Al Quaeda; etc.
It is this kind of idiotic, self created noise that facilitated the success of the 9-11 attacks in the first place. You will recall that there was intel on most of the individuals who hijacked those planes buried in a sea of unprocessed intercepts and data.