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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 20 2015, @11:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the kiss-your-freedom-goodbye dept.

Issac Asimov's Harry Seldon used "psycho-history" to predict the future. Tom Cruise used "precogs" in Minority Report. And now a pro-Putin think tank is trying to divine dissident activity by mining social media.

The Center for Research in Legitimacy and Political Protest claims to have developed software that will search Russian social media posts for signs of plans by political opposition to the government to stage unapproved protests or meetings. Described by an Izvestia report [in Russian] as "a system to prevent mass disorder," the software searches through social media posts once every five minutes to catch hints of "unauthorized actions" and potentially alert law enforcement to prevent them.

Public protests, rallies, marches, and meetings staged without government approval are outlawed in Russia—individuals can be fined up to about $600 (30,000 rubles) for participating in such events or sentenced to 50 hours of community service.

The software, which went live on May 18, is named "Laplace's demon" after the theoretical all-seeing intellect that could calculate the future of the universe based on the position and state of all matter. According to the Center's director, Yevgeny Venediktov, the software specifically monitors "politically oriented groups of social protest" at a national level, as well as local discussion platforms for specific geographic areas. "Particular attention will be paid to the number of likes and reposts in extremist groups." Groups and user pages associated with "extremists" are tagged by volunteers, aggregated into a central database, and analyzed and filtered by sociologists and political scientists.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/pre-thoughtcrime-russian-think-tank-app-catches-protestors-before-they-protest/

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by tftp on Thursday May 21 2015, @04:33PM

    by tftp (806) on Thursday May 21 2015, @04:33PM (#186078) Homepage

    Stalin was Georgian, not Russian. The people millions he killed were not his countrymen. They were the descendants of the enemies of his countrymen.

    The reality is much more complicated than that. As matter of fact, Stalin was not even a Georgian. He was an Ossetian [wikipedia.org]. Those "minor details" are not exactly minor, considering that Georgia went to war with Ossetia [wikipedia.org]. Today North Ossetia is part of Russian Federation, and South Ossetia is closely aligned. Georgia is an enemy state to them, and the border is fortified. Politics in the mountains of Caucasus is highly tribal, with blood feuds being the norm (even today in Chechnya.)

    But that in itself is not particularly important. Stalin was an internationalist. He did not pay attention to national origins of a person; he only paid attention to how that person can be used by the state. In this aspect he was an extreme pragmatist. He was not religious either, despite his early education.

    Historians and fiction authors have written thousands of volumes on the subject of those mass killings. Myself, I have read at least a hundred. It's hard to explain it all in one sentence. The primary reason was in political struggle at the top. Trotsky and his adherents were trying to change the course of USSR. Trotsky was exiled, but plenty of his supporters remained in key positions. They became the first who were tried and executed. Another reason is in paranoia of Stalin. I cannot say if it was justified, but he trusted people even less than I do :-) Yet another reason was in the large system of secret police (GPU, NKVD) that had been set up from the first days of revolution (1917.) That system had to justify its existence by discovering more and more "agents of imperialism." Yet another reason was in persons who led those organizations - Genrikh Yagoda [wikipedia.org], Nikolai Yezhov [wikipedia.org], Lavrentiy Beria [wikipedia.org]. Yet another reason was in the profit motive that was present in a lot of convictions (not for the NKVD, in general, but for those who accused the person.) Yet another reason was in the Soviet tendency of set up plans and quotes that are based on last year's numbers. So if NKVD arrested 10,000 people last year, in this year they'd better arrest 15,000. Yet another reason was called "normalcy bias [wikipedia.org]." There are many more reasons, and each of them affected the end result.

    But there is one thing that is pretty much a fact. USSR would not have survived the attack of Nazi Germany without an iron discipline that was enforced on factories and in fields. People were working extra long shifts to manufacture weapons and ammo, food and clothes. They were fed with whatever little remained after the bulk of food was sent to the troops. People were given impossible goals all the time - and promised to be shot if they fail to meet them. Those promises were kept. Those extraordinary efforts made it possible to match the German military power by 1943 and to significantly exceed it by the end of the war; and to develop the nuclear weapon by the time when new post-war tensions started mounting.

    As any moving mechanism, the system of oppression could not be stopped instantly - and hardly anyone on the top felt the need to stop it. Stalin came up with an idea, even before the war, that the class struggle intensifies as USSR approaches Socialism. Stalin was not a mathematician and did not know what an extrapolation is. So he just winged it. This theory was used as a basis for many convictions after the war. Later it was abandoned, of course.

    As you can see, this is a very complex mess. The only certainty here is that nationality played hardly any role in those events.

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