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Homeland Security Video Podcasts: Milgram's Muppets

Fri, 03/13/2009 - 11:12 — ICGREEN

Viewpoints In Homeland Defense And Security
Homeland Security Leaders Give Opinions on Current Issues and Challenges (Author: NPS Center for Homeland Defense and Security)
http://www.podanza.com/podcast/viewpoints-in-homeland-defense-and-securi...

The above site has video podcasts in which "Homeland Security Leaders Give Opinions on Current Issues and Challenges". I watched a couple of pod casts this morning.

The interviewers and their guests speak in very reasonable sounding tones. They sit up tall and straight, yet relaxed, and enunciate clearly. The issues they address are real.

In "Managing The Data Explosion" in fusion centers where the analysts tackle all hazards and all crimes they talk about circular reporting. Everybody keeps sending the same information around and around. Just like we get the same joke via email. It comes as tube, then someone takes a few lines out of it and sends it as text. Then it shows up on an RSS feed or something.Then you send it out to two different mailing lists, and your friend Bob is on both lists and then takes credit for originating the joke. Homeland Security wants to control all that so their analysts don't have to slog through it all to solve hazards and crimes. That's a real data management issue, I guess.

After they have solved abstracting and distributing:

"There will be a day when we turn to citizens to become collectors of information. And that information will be flowing through the centers. And that information will be analyzed not just by the police but by many other disciplines and then the data needs to be pushed out through those other disciplines."

Am I dreaming?
Anyways,

In the award-winning "Chds Thesis Series Spring 2008: Introducing The Future Now: Using Memetics And Popular Culture To Identify The Post 9/11 Homeland Security Zeitgeist" the interviewee in the podcast describes how she has tracked "memes", aka units of communication, like "Where's the beef?" She has found that the original intent of some of Homeland Security's memes have been morphed in popular culture to the point where Homeland Security is another way of saying "the bad guys". This is important for Homeland Security because the next time they have a message they are going to have to be more careful about their memes.

The issues for both of the interviewees are real except, perhaps, the raison d'être for the entire effort. There were some real issues for the subjects of Milgram's experiments, too. Like exactly when and how to push the button that tortured the victim. "Why?" was the real issue, though.

Are these video pod casts actual recordings of Milgram's Muppets? It's fun to watch just like a Muppet show.

Are the Homeland Security Memes delivered in a strong, clear, authoritative voice? Is that why they continue to press the buttons that sends electronic shocks through the constitution and shocks through people in ways the constitution never conjectured?

Have they caught any bad guys yet? They have made a bunch up. They have tortured lots. They let the ones they know about walk away into lovely retirements.

Rolling Stone magazine reports on the big brother Golden Shield in China, and in another article shows that Homeland Security hasn't caught anybody yet.
Winter Patriot cast very serious doubts about the veracity of the terror plots, from the ridiculous liquid bombers to a punk trading crappy old stereo speakers for a hand grenade. The security forces haven't caught anybody they didn't make up themselves.

But they are getting better and better at knowing when to push the buttons. In fact, they investigate credit card fraud. But they won't be hired to actually wire up the system because then they would find out that the wires don't actually do what they think they do.

They could be really good actors and know already. Hard to say.

Rashid Rauf
http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/search/label/Rashid%20Rauf

Golden Shield:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/

Milgram:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Comments

Fri, 03/13/2009 - 17:18 — james

Yale and Stanford

Thanks for this excellent post, IC. It's very topical. For some reason I have always thought Milgram conducted his experiment at Stanford, not Yale. I think I might have been confusing it with Zimbardo's Prison Experiment (link via your Milgram link).

You Wrote-
"The issues for both of the interviewees are real except, perhaps, the raison d'être for the entire effort. There were some real issues for the subjects of Milgram's experiments, too. Like exactly when and how to push the button that tortured the victim. "Why?" was the real issue, though."
Bingo! "They" always distract you with the minor issues leaving the major one that sets everybody off down the slippery slope unexamined.

I'm working my way through the links. Something I didn't realise before was that the "experimenter" sat to the left side of the "teacher" and therefore spoke to his left ear. And the closeness of his proximity, or not, affected the comliance level. This mirrors the behaviour of ""professional" torturers such as in the CIA's MKUltra program(me) which was going on at the same time. They would subject the victims (children) to excruciating noise in the right ear and yell their messages into the left ear. There is a neurological reason for doing this (which I forget now). I have to wonder if there was a link.

"But they are getting better and better at knowing when to push the buttons. In fact, they investigate credit card fraud. But they won't be hired to actually wire up the system because then they would find out that the wires don't actually do what they think they do."

Could you expand on this, IC?

Mon, 03/16/2009 - 11:05 — Anonymous (not verified)

James, It's I, ICGREEN

Hi James,

I have very limited access to internet right now. I should be back in a week or so.

Wed, 03/18/2009 - 00:04 — james

Waving, IC!

I thought you might have fallen off the edge, mate!

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