Beta Testers Required

Katabasis has left the following comment on my EU Mass Surveillance Project post. It deserves to be given a higher profile. He requires beta testers. I know most, or even all, of you have greater understanding of computer technology than me, so could I ask you to consider his request.

Subrosa - thanks for drawing people's attention to this - in particular for the link to INDECT.

For anyone who is interested, the outline of Work Package 4 in the INDECT project - which covers: "the development of key technologies that facilitate the building of an intelligence gathering system by combining and extending the current state-of-the-art methods in Natural Language Processing"

was leaked to Wikileaks some time ago. You can download it here.

For anyone who doesn't know how these EU funded research projects work - each project is broken down into specific work areas ('Work Packages'), usually with one particular institution in the research consortium taking the lead on that WP if they have a specialisation in that area (in this case, the University of York - bastards).

This document does not give the final specification to INDECT - the project is still ongoing and this is simply unknowable until it comes to an end. However the above document is very detailed and gives great insight into INDECT's methodology - sufficiently so that it is possible to counter it.

Sorry to use your blog as an advertising platform for this Subrosa - however there's no other way to get this information about:

For anyone interested I am working on two applications that will provide the basis for beginning an active resistance to this kind of passive surveillance.

The first - which is almost ready for beta testing and will be available within a few weeks at the domain: censoring.me - I still need beta testers however. The application is a reporting mechanism for people to report when they have been censored online; the primary targets are mainstream news websites and blogs run by people who hold high office (MPs and above). Any help testing would be appreciated; I pretty much have the technical side in the bag but really need to tune the user interface and work out the specific functions the site will offer.

The second is a very in depth piece of computer science. I have been submitting it as a research proposal to several universities and have been getting a lot of interest. I can't share many details of it openly because it is a novel idea that hasn't been capitalised on yet. If I can get this application working as a prototype I can expand its capabilities to provide a distributed piece of software that will enable its users to run active interference on any attempts - such as INDECT to passively monitor them. I'm happy to share the proposal with anyone interested in working on it with me - *please note* - I am actively seeking funding for this project and aim to do so (if I am persistent) within a year. Also I'd ask anyone who reads it to give me a promise of confidentiality until a prototype application is ready to roll.

Anyone who is interested in either of these, please contact me on:

katabaticwinds AT gmail[NO SPAM] DOT com

^ remember to removed the [NO SPAM] from the email addy above (email farming spiders are continually improving).

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