Yes, that is called a false flag. It happens and might be a lot more common than you think. Released documents even state that this is something they plan to use (at least in the digital realm) to support their agenda.
I wonder at what point everyone will finally call bullshit on all of this. The attitudes developed by their propaganda has only generated more and more animosity and hate between people. If the objective was really to protect public safety, they should just put themselves in jail and throw away the keys.
Unfortunately, there is no economic incentive for them to stop violence. The more violence that happens (even if it is an indirect byproduct of their backwards policies) only generates more fear in congress to throw more money and power in their direction. Additionally, they do not hesitate in any way to lie and misrepresent information in a way that benefits them and there is little repercussion for not doing their jobs to the utmost standard. The too big to jail mentality is more dangerous to our country than anything. Clearly this hasn't been effective and a more effective way to solve the problem would be to restrict their funding more and more for their mistakes.
If they weren't going full cointelpro on people who are skeptical then I'm sure there would be plenty of people who support their missions... It should be common sense that irrational responses only promote further irrationality.
After their complacency in supporting the use of torture, it's surprising the APA and psychology as a profession hasn't been completely dissolved yet. Clearly the use of their research (which isn't even reproducible ...) has only found uses for nefarious purposes rather than helping people.
The fact is it is being used to persecute people with unpopular beliefs. The evidence is taken out of context or completely false. You just hear very little about its misuse because poor, defenseless, innocent people are targeted. They are not obligated to present the court with information that is true.
We should all be really concerned given that a majority of the technologies being funded to fight terrorism are nothing but pseudoscience in addition to being contrary to respecting civil liberties. The inability to question the legitimacy of any of these programs is doing more public harm than good. Beyond that, we are putting an enormous amount of power in the hands of a few individuals who despite having the best intentions can still make poor decisions or even cognitively make decisions that knowingly jeopardize public safety. I am worried that there is now no economic incentive for these individuals to prevent violence if their failures and abuses are only awarded with more power and resources. Instead we will just continue to write blank checks for psuedoscience that will further promote a growing divide between the public and their governments.
I've observed this as well by the TSA which is probably a good implementation. What we should be worried about however are the poor implementations and exploitations of these concepts and ideas. I'm concerned about the occurrences that probably generate misguided animosity towards people who are genuinely concerned about the safety of passengers. When you have events like what unfolded in New Orleans and LA we should wondering what motivated such actions.
I've observed the horrible nature of this program in person while traveling. During the practice, the TSA staff talked loudly to threaten passengers and then also made "jokes" to passengers about finding chemicals on them. Essentially they try to escalate the fear among all the passengers and then single out someone who responds the most poorly. Not to mention the fact that anyone who has protested or complained about any of these controversial programs are being targeted without any basis. Psychological warfare is being conducted on American soil against innocent Americans.
An HTTPS only standard is not going to mitigate MITM attacks which is invariably the biggest issue regardless of perpetrators although this is clearly a step in the right direction.
"People are very overconfident in human ability despite overwhelming evidence we suck at predicting things and doing anything statistics related. Human error is just ignored or seen as an inevitable fact of life."
Programs don't program themselves. Algorithmic biases often reflect human biases. If we want people to accept technology and give us opportunities to pursue our visions of what technology can offer society we need to be cognitive of ethical and moral challenges especially when there is so much at stake. Yes there are fields where there are regulatory and liability issues, but I'm more worried about the fields where there isn't as much oversight and transparency.
I'm worried about living in a society where we've become overly dependent upon statistical methods for important decision making especially when we aren't allowed to question their integrity, precision, and limitations. As a scientist I know the reality is there is a lot of terrible data being produced through various methods and I've met a lot of PhD students in the field of machine learning who argue against starting from scratch even when it's quite apparent their prior abstractions are incorrect. The reality is there are a lot of promises being made by ML researchers and dishonesty about their competency and ability to achieve those results. This is absolutely not unique to ML and plagues a lot of other fields as well. We really need more ML researchers to be actively critical about research being performed in the ML field if ML is going to achieve it's full potential.
Hate to inform you that anyone can be classified as "irregular" regardless of how innocent/harmless you are... Just ask all the black lives matters and occupy protesters who are currently getting harassed.
Facebook allowed a research project to experiment on people's emotions by modifying the content displayed on their news feed. Human experimentation in doing things like this is against all ethical principles important in science. If they are willing to commit such a blatant violation of ethics what makes you think they aren't participating in something far worse? I commend Stallman for sharing his opinions on facebook, a modern day societal cancer.
Drones could of given the US a huge tactical advantage in a conflict between nations... their overuse has simply allowed the US's enemies to derive solutions against them removing any tactical advantage we originally had.
They have an immense amount of power to crush anyone regardless of whether it is interest of the United States or not. Their methods are so clandestine and underhanded that they are almost to fight against. Given what we know about the discriminatory practices of public servants who operate in the public's eye do we really believe that giving the intelligence communities this amount of power that they wouldn't abuse this power and operate descriptively against ethnic and political minorities? They are essentially robbing the public blind right now and sacrificing our national security so they can have more power domestically.