EOTO #2

The second round of EOTO presentations I found very valuable. I learned new things that I had no idea affected my daily life. Below I have listed some of my favorite policies and highlighted some notes I found interesting. 

Total information awareness is a terrorist information awareness organization. TIA was meant to take in data and store it to filter out possible terrorist attacks. The problem with this was that it was collecting and storing data from the entire population. The issue is that everyone is taken into account and their privacy is not. Instead of becoming a terrorist identification tool, it became a mass surveillance platform. 

We also learned about whistleblowers which are government employees that expose the misdeeds of the government agencies. Before some whistleblowers these agencies were not publicly known about, people being spied on without their consent or knowledge. 

A similar data collection agency spoken about was five eyes, which is named by the five large countries that are participants. Five Eyes is an international data-sharing agency. There are two parts first is Prism which gathers personal data, and Upstream which gathers phone calls and text messages. 

The echo chamber is the effect of echoing one popular idea and suppressing all others. This is very popular on current social media outlets. This is a harmful effect in most scenarios because it doesn't allow any other points of view which may be essential information. 

Overall these presentations were very informative and educational. It is good that everyone knows about the types of surveillance and mass data collection the government is doing, along with the tactics used to spread information on social media platforms.