The US Department of Homeland Security is funding a program to get several universities to develop software to monitor foreign media for their sentiments on US policy. Press freedom people don’t like it, but I don’t see why not. What, don’t they know that governments already monitor these things? It’d be nice to have a resource on the foreign media, it’s important for the US government to follow debates in other countries, and they might even learn something from it. For the Arab world it would certainly be nice to have an Arab press monitoring service that doesn’t have an agenda like MEMRI and would place articles in the context of the reputation of their writer and the publications they are printed in. The BBC Monitoring Service, for one, is a quite decent basic source of info of that kind. But people are so suspicious of US security policy these days that they automatically see a threat. It won’t be if it’s done transparently, is peer-reviewed, and doesn’t spin things.
“It won’t be if it’s done transparently, is peer-reviewed, and doesn’t spin things”
What in Gods name gives you the slightest inkiling of a suggestion of a clue that this administration can do anything transparently, will have anything peer reviewd and won’t spin things? This is the same administration that believes its ok to target media organisations with heavy weaponry
This actually seems really interesting. As a software product, it could have various flavors (certain features available commercially, others left only for security agencies), and be customizable… let people track sentiments, trends, about anything. It’s almost like a very advanced version of Google News, with heavy customization and aggregation, innit?
I don’t think it’s Orwellian like someone in the linked article suggests–like you say, governments do this already–they keep files on individuals, monitor news services and individual reporters, stuff like that. Concerns about spin and peer review, I think, are valid, but are separate from concerns about the software itself.
The software would just spit out results generated by algorithm. For example, they’d type in “Issandr El Amrani” and get X Y and Z about you. It’s how they anayze that X, Y, and Z that might be controversial, but no more or less so than how they do such things now. And how the X, Y, and Z are reached… well, that would be customizable, but the customization would reflect the biases and desires of the user–so again, no different than now. What I mean is, for the algorithm to work, to have an “opinion”, the user would have to describe which opinion the algorithm is to have. That would come down, basically, to inputing value judgements on individual terms, words, phrases, types of speech, languages, etc. So the user would just bias the algorithm as he/she is biased (or as someone else is perceived to be bias) — but algorithm, the software itself, remains neutral.
So the bias of the people setting the sensitivies of the software, and their spin of the results, might be controversial, but, same time, that’s no different than how things are now (the bias of intelligence analysts and the spin of the White House — same thing) and, better yet: it would be quite easy to find out those biases (just print out the database tables where the values are stored; if they’re kept secret, a leak or a hack would happen sooner than later, I imagine). In this way, then, such software would actually force the user to confront his/her own biases, because, again, it would force them to make very specific, discrete value judgments (ie, “If the article is in Arabic, does that merit added concern? And if so, how much? Rate from 1 to 10.”). That alone might prompt progress, or at least self-knowledge on the part of the end-user.
So…. I’m sorry did that make any sense to anyone but me? In sum up, this sort of software has fascinating potential, and not all draconian. Just the opposite–it could make transparency and peer review harder to avoid, because it would make biases and value judgements so much harder to hide.
Frankly, I agree with Mo. I think they are doing quite enough already both in terms of monitoring and in tryinb to counteract. I did an internship with the Heritage Foundation-run Center for Journalism and what I saw there has made me distrust the “conservative media” and their pals every since. I disllike any form of unmonitored surveillance, especially one that uses this form. The present US dog and pony show in Iraq has shown the US stoops to planting stories, paying off journalists, creating “news” agencies and targetting journalists. And that’s just where they visibly have their hands in things, I suspect that the CIA has also been behind the disappearence and torture of various journlists over the years. They thought about taking out Al Jazeera in Qatar, Under this adminstration, that of Nixon and REagan,certain US writers have been hassled in a variety of ways within the US. What it boils down to is that the US does not really encourage Free Press except when it is free to support their policies and those of their allies.
Maybe we can do this for ourselves instead of having the US government do it for us. Here, I’m doing my bit:
http://arabangles.wordpress.com/
If anyone wants to help by translating articles, they’d be very welcome to do so.