Thread by @ENBrown

I want to follow up on a few things from my Marriott story from earlier this week, since it's a long piece & the really crazy stuff, imho, doesn't come until the second half...

https://twitter.com/ENBrown/status/1092780279104712704

Marriott's "anti-trafficking" policies & the DHS/ICE program behind them is based on a load of crap that only leads to things like the Cindy McCain nonsense we're seeing now reason.com/blog/2019/02/0…

But the damage it can inflict is minimal compared to associated programs

Like what? Let's start w/the $67 million cache of escort & gun ads our top gov't scientists have built up reason.com/archives/2019/…

NASA, DARPA, & their many private & cop partners are working w/text, metadata, contact info, photos, videos, & anything else associated w/millions of posts to ad sites & web forums

The majority of it comes from data scraped from escort review & ads sites -- but weapons forums like @armslist were big forums too, and Twitter got at least some attention

So, yes, the government knows if you've ever advertised sex work or a gun between 2014-2017 reason.com/archives/2019/…

and sure: people posted these things to public websites

But it's one thing to know your ad might be stored on Craigslist servers forever & another if it's been analyzed, cross-referenced across platforms, archived by the Dept of Defense, & then used in a vast array of research

This project--Memex was its initial form--isn't going to stay just targeting sex workers & gun buyers, of course

researchers say in many places & ways that this is meant to develop web surveillance + image recognition tools that can be used across all platforms

80 million web pages and 40 million images have been indexed as part of this Memex program. But that's just the start reason.com/archives/2019/…

The research -- you can read a lot of it here memex.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html#pub… -- uses mainly sex worker ads as the test case to develop a wide array of new web surveillance tools

here are more examples of the projects being funded nij.gov/funding/awards…

There are a lot of open source repositories for these research projects on Github if you search for Memex. A start -
github.com/darpa-i2o/meme…

oh yeah, and Sheriff Dart--the one who had to be told by a federal judge to stop targeting Backpage & Craigslist--is now really excited about targeting hotels reason.com/archives/2019/…

& just in case it wasn't abundantly clear, a lot of things these projects used to track potential indicators of sex trafficking were really racist!, like did the poster come from a Southeast Asian country or talk about Asian spas & massage

So pretty much there is biased bullshit baked into this government anti-trafficking propaganda from inception to application

And it’s going to be used to censor & surveil us all

I guess that’s about it