Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Ars has a great short article about the new military program: "Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information".

I have to say, this program comes in dirt cheap on the military scale but is still ridiculous. Sure it might be good for the government to know what is popular in the blogosphere - I do not think anyone disputes that - but I think the author of the article is absolutely correct in his skeptical (and sarcastic) tone. The military should probably already know about the examples cited *before* the blogs do anyway, and there are certainly pre-existing means to determine a blog "pulse" which are less expensive.

What really struck me though was the venom from 90% of the commenters who launched ad hominem attacks against the author and spouted all sorts of pro "war on terror" nonsense (most of it laced with profound ignorance, Iraq and 9/11 connections, "liberal tautology", etc). (The title of the article even came with "warning sarcasm ahead".) The author was informing people about the program and made a few sarcastic jokes along the way that were also valid points (human intelligence, etc).