The British do the same, I believe. As for the privacy thing. I'm thinking that some of it is waived if you tell a bunch of people something on a social media site.

However I think that certain trends are useful to know. Like the 286,000,000 people that all have a friend that found a kitten and need them to click to give it a home.

If they're reading and paying attention to my facebook they'll toss me in the Gulag

A CIA team known internally as the "vengeful librarians" that numbers in the hundreds gathers information in multiple languages to build a real-time picture of the mood in various regions of the world.

Fark you for stealing my band name, CIA.

I for one am not surprised at this.


/posted from a govt computer.
//wink.

I feel legitimately sorry for whatever poor bastards are assigned to comb through that crap. I mean, seriously, who do you have to piss off to be assigned to trawl through twitter for useful information? That's like searching for a needle in a tsunami made of haystacks.

/You waive any privacy regarding things posted on a world-readable website
//The Gubmint is as free to read it as anyone else

That really blows up my plane and kills the infidels.

Its twitter.... its public. you tweet to everyone.

Its not exactly computer surviellance if my grandmother can do the same thing.

erik-k: I mean, seriously, who do you have to piss off to be assigned to trawl through twitter for useful information?

I sound fat: Its not exactly computer surviellance if my grandmother can do the same thing.

TFA basically says that they are gauging the public mood, rather than searching for actionable intelligence. Which is even creepier, if you think about it.

TL;DR: people in government jobs waste time at work on twitter, facebook and other social media websites "working".

Trust me, They® read through Fark as well, and not for 'public mood', either.

Have been for, oh, at least seven years or so.

r1niceboy: The British do the same, I believe. As for the privacy thing. I'm thinking that some of it is waived if you tell a bunch of people something on a social media site.

No, no it's not, not any more than saying something to your friends means the government gets to know it. However when it's a completely public social media site then no, there's no expectation/possibility of privacy (except for direct messages they don't have access to anyway).

beerbaron: I sound fat: Its not exactly computer surviellance if my grandmother can do the same thing.

TFA basically says that they are gauging the public mood, rather than searching for actionable intelligence. Which is even creepier, if you think about it.

Current global mindset:
#Don'tyouhateitwhenyoustickyourdickinapencilsharpener
OMG KIM KARDIASHIAN'S ASS
I dropped my iPhone while pooping

erik-k: I feel legitimately sorry for whatever poor bastards are assigned to comb through that crap. I mean, seriously, who do you have to piss off to be assigned to trawl through twitter for useful information? That's like searching for a needle in a tsunami made of haystacks.

/You waive any privacy regarding things posted on a world-readable website
//The Gubmint is as free to read it as anyone else

If you want to make it interesting for them, tweet random stuff. I mean, like, take a bag of Scrabble tiles, and pull one out, type it, put it back in the bag, and do it again and again, building up random 5 letter groups that look like this:

AHWUD HHDEW PONEW NAEIS MSDFE QQQEC MRASA

Alternatively, you can roll a handful of 10-sided dice a few times, and get random 10 number groups like this:

31704 41347 18797 20708 44588 52627 50903 60352 99426 63376 58119 02778

It will drive them *NUTS* trying to figure out what you are saying.

Alternatively, if you did want to tweet stuff that only your intended recipient can read, you could use those 10-sided dice to generate cryptologically secure one time pads, which you could use to encipher your communications, like this:

05231 78339 84930 56771 56307 90378 87391 89017 57478 90552 51175 68745 05231

/Everything you need to decrypt that is in my profile.

Meh. If it's on the internet, someone is reading it or will read it. Even if it's just some punk kid hacking accounts for the hell of it, someone sees everything.

If people don't want governments to know their moods, they probably shouldn't tweet their outrage.

dittybopper:

/Everything you need to decrypt that is in my profile.


Except instructions.

Echelon (new window)?

Embden.Meyerhof: dittybopper:

/Everything you need to decrypt that is in my profile.


Except instructions.

OK, I'll get you started.

First and last group are the page number. That's the page number, which you can see in my profile, so we can ignore it. First real group is this:

78339

We need to subtract the value from the first group of the pad in my profile from this:

78339
88254
---------

Now, you can't subtract it "normally", because the group was made using non-carrying addition, so we have to use "imaginary borrowing". Since 7-8 is negative, we put an imaginary tens digit in front of the 7, so it's (1)7-8 = 9. Doing that where necessary results in this:

78339
88254
---------
90185

90185 is our first "plaintext" group, but it doesn't mean much, so we look those numbers up in the straddling checkerboard in my profile, and we get the following:

90185
RAL ?

Note that in my straddling checkerboard, any number that starts with a 1, or with a 5, uses two numbers to represent a letter. We don't know what the 5? is yet, because we haven't completely decrypted the digraph (it spans two groups), but we know it has to be P,Q,U,V,W,X,Y,Z,., or /.

Already we can see a hint of plaintext there. Do all the groups, and see what the message is.

Once you work that out, congratulations. You know how to use a One Time Pad, the only provably secure way to encipher, one that will resist all cryptanalysis (including rubber hose cryptanalysis) forever, provided you follow the very few simple rules.

Generating secure pads is trickier, but it can be done relatively quickly manually with some 10-sided dice.

I'm disappointed. No one posted the plaintext.