More on Able Danger: A Hillary! Connection

The program was scrapped because the data-mining and connection-making software turned up too many prominent Washington names. Including Hillary!

As Captain's Quarters notes, given that this particular search concerned Chinese espionage, it's hardly surprising the name Hillary Rodham Clinton popped up. In fact, the program would be a failure if it didn't note the connections between Johnny Chung and the Clintons.

A very poor decision. Yes, prominent names are going to turn up; anyone's whose spent more than five minutes on the Internet knows you can find vague connections between just about anyone.

I just applied for Google ads. I was rejected for "objectionalbe content." Knowing this decision was made by a computer -- which almost certainly raised red flags over the sexual language in the Dick Cheney threads -- I figured the computer had mistakenly labled this a porn site. A gay porn site. A gay porn site with a pronounced bestiality/Dick Cheney fetish.

So I wrote back and asked them to take a common-sense second-look with human eyes. Within 12 hours they wrote back to say that the site was unobjectionable as regards content.

If people working at Google can use common sense to toss out the sort of silly conclusions mindless computers sometimes arrive at, why couldn't the military intelligence people at the Pentagon?

posted by Ace at 03:29 PM

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