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from the hey-they're-talking-to-me-too! dept.
It’s common knowledge the NSA collects plenty of data on suspected terrorists as well as ordinary citizens but the agency also has algorithms in place to filter out information that doesn’t need to be collected or stored for further analysis, such as spam emails. Now Alice Truong reports that during operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, the US was able to analyze laptops formerly owned by Taliban members and according to NSA officer Michael Wertheimer discovered an email written in English found on the computers contained a purposely spammy subject line: “CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT.” According to Wertheimer, the email was sent to and from nondescript addresses that were later confirmed to belong to combatants. "It is surely the case that the sender and receiver attempted to avoid allied collection of this operational message by triggering presumed “spam” filters (PDF)." From a surveillance perspective, Wertheimer writes that this highlights the importance of filtering algorithms. Implementing them makes parsing huge amounts of data easier, but it also presents opportunities for someone with a secret to figure out what type of information is being tossed out and exploit the loophole.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Sunday January 18 2015, @02:43PM
I've not seen many corpses exhibiting free will.
The reason I modified it to perhaps not 100% and gave a nursing home as an example is that I figured you might well be religious and basing your objection on an afterlife that allows freedom of action. Obviously, there's no way I can to 100% disprove that.
But, save for that, yes, death is the end of liberty.
And, watching my parents age and temporarily be put in a nursing home, I noted that not only the human institutionalization but the very loss of abilities limited terribly what they could do. If you want to be pedantic, yes, they were still free to do anything, but were unable. It was a difference that hardly made a difference.
That was 15 years ago. Now, I see the smart ham radio operator who lived across the street and seemed to know how to fix almost anything in the world, when I was a child, suffering from Alzheimer's. He's in an assisted care facility and other wise healthy, but can't even operate radios that a few years ago he could have designed and built. That's hardly "liberty" in the way most would define it.
But, if you want the point to be that P(loss of liberty) is unequal 1, then of course. 100% is rarely possible to prove, and I was using a more colloquial method of phrasing.