I think Bruce Schneier’s right on the money when he calls this Opinion Monitoring Software Orwellian.
It’s like the sort of thing you can imagine a nascent Ministry of Truth using to separate the goodthinkers from the crimethinkers.
It starts out well enough and sounds like a useful tool to track world opinion on the US and its government’s policies and as result make the US a more responsible player on the world stage.
A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.
Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.
But like any tool there is scope for misuse of the technology should the research into it actually bear fruit in this case.
