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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Thursday, October 17, 2013

A Twitter-Fed alliance to spy on "depressed" people



DHS spies on "depressed" Twitter users
Remember Big Brother is bipartisan.  Every one of
these 1984 Surveillance State programs is funded
by a Democrat Senate and a GOP House.


The federal government is "studying" how to use Twitter for surveillance on depressed people.  (Does being depressed about Socialism count?)

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) began a study financed by the National Institutes of Health last month that will provide “population level depression monitoring” through the social media site.

The project, “Utilizing Social Media as a Resource for Mental Health Surveillance,” is costing taxpayers $82,800.

While Twitter has been used by government agencies, such as the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security, for national security related monitoring, the project suggests the social network can be used for public health surveillance as well.

“Major depressive disorder is one of the most common debilitating illnesses in the United States, with a lifetime prevalence of 16.2 [percent],” the project grant states. “Currently, nationwide mental health surveillance takes the form of large-scale telephone- based surveys,” reports the Washington Free Beacon.


The project argues that Twitter is preferable to phone surveys on the mentally ill because the site offers a “multilingual source of real time data for public health surveillance.”

“We propose using twitter and [Natural Language Processing] NLP as a cost-effective and flexible approach to augmenting current telephone- based surveillance methods for population level depression monitoring,” the grant said.

The researchers will create algorithms to determine if people are depressed through their tweets, which they hope will serve as a basis for monitoring mental illness. They will also engage with depressed individuals on Twitter directly.

“Developing these algorithms and resources will provide the bedrock for building social media based surveillance systems,” the grant said.

The study will also look into ethical and privacy issues for using Twitter to survey the mentally ill.

Mike Conway, Project Scientist in the Division of Behavioral Medicine at UCSD, is leading the study. His research interests include “using social media to track health behaviours [sic].”

Conway’s most recent research subject was monitoring tweets about tobacco use.

The project’s “public health relevance statement” states that monitoring Twitter for depressed tweets has “public health at its core.” The researchers say the project is innovative because “microblogs have not been used before for mental health surveillance.”

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1984 is Here

"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." - - - Robert A. Heinlein


Below are a few of our most recent articles on the march to a 1984 Police State:

THE FEDERALIST - "China hires two million Internet "monitors"

THE FEDERALIST - "Religious Persecution at Lackland Air Force Base - The Thought Police are Here"

THE FEDERALIST - "The NSA hacks circle the wagons to defend unconstitutional spying"

THE FEDERALIST - "DHS to scan every face at local hockey game"

THE FEDERALIST - "Obama to scan 42 Billion credit card transactions"

THE FEDERALIST - "Government Satellites to Control Your Car's Speed"

THE FEDERALIST - "DEA has been spying on your phones since 1987"

THE FEDERALIST - "Governments spy on 38,000 Facebook users"

THE FEDERALIST - "New Zealand Conservatives ram 1984 bill through"

THE FEDERALIST - "DHS installs spy scanners at shopping malls"

THE FEDERALIST - "Trash cans gather your Smartphone info"

THE FEDERALIST - "Big Brother shuts down encrypted Internet service"

THE FEDERALIST - "Secret Service to spy on Facebook, Twitter"

THE FEDERALIST - "The FBI listens to you through your computer"

THE FEDERALIST - "NSA records your Facebook chats and so much more"

THE FEDERALIST - "New Zealand Conservatives Push 1984 Spying"

THE FEDERALIST - "Big Brother Wants Your Internet Passwords"

THE FEDERALIST - "SHOCK - Military spy blimps over Washington D.C."

THE FEDERALIST - "GOP joins Obama to abolish the 4th Amendment - NSA Police State Spying Backed"

THE FEDERALIST - "Conservatives act to censor the Internet"

THE FEDERALIST - "Black boxes forced on your car by Big Brother"

THE FEDERALIST - "Your computerized license plate is spying on you"

THE FEDERALIST - "Big Brother is Tracking All Cars - The Bill of Rights is Abolished"

THE FEDERALIST - "Twitter Gives Data to the Government - The Thought Police are Coming for You"

THE FEDERALIST - "The NSA Has Inserted Its Code Into Smartphones"


"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it... All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children."
George Orwell

1984, Book 1, Chapter 2

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