Data Scraping
The New Yorker is a mixed bag these day with too many Vanity Fairesque pieces about celebrities I don't know and too many iPhone paintings on its cover, however when it's good it's good. Recent standouts were a quantum computing article, one about the development of the novel, and one about the rise of an Orwellian state. An American spy agency has in the past ten years developed the ability to monitor every email sent in the USA [and elsewhere but that's not the issue here], as well as store them all in case they need a light snack later. The data of their own fellow citizens! In former times they were unable to legally scrape their own citizens' data, however they can do anything they please now.
That doesn't even seem possible, yet through the magic of sifting and sorting by algorithm, with their unprecedentedly immense data storage facilities, and empowered by the post-Twin Towers attack paranoia as well as a 70 million dollar per year electricity bill, they somehow manage to do what is evil to terrorists (what, 25,000 of them, tops?) and evil also to the entire population of the United States (312 million + ~11 million illegal aliens). Nice.
And we complain about Facebook and Google.
Labels: Bad Persons Bureau
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