"The key finding was that seemingly meaningless slang and jargon can reveal important properties of the author's identity, a point of interest for both corporations and the intelligence community," Mr. Bryant said.
(Greenpeace exists only on private individual donations. Every year the organization has an independent audit. The organization does not accept funds from corporations, governments or intelligence secret services).
Thanks to all the technology we casually use every day, everyone from corporations to government intelligence agencies to petty criminals have the opportunity to snoop through our stuff on a level that would have been unimaginable just a couple of decades ago.
WikiLeaks itself has published e-mails from Stratfor, a private intelligence corporation, which state that a grand jury has already returned a sealed indictment of Mr. Assange.
"Say you get an order to monitor a block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at a big corporation, and instead of just monitoring those, the N.S.A. also monitors another block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at that corporation," one senior intelligence official said.
Salon.com's Andrew Leonard notes that in the Bridge trilogy, Gibson's villains change from multinational corporations and artificial intelligences of the Sprawl trilogy to the mass media – namely tabloid television and the cult of celebrity.
It will also want to ask about the relationship between the state, commercial technology giants and telecom companies – and the outsourcing of highly sensitive intelligence to corporations.
Although an Echelon system exists, it is not controlled by the National Security Agency to provide American corporations with stolen industrial intelligence, according to Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive.
For good or evil, it seems inevitable that individuals, corporations, political leaders and intelligence agencies will come to use planetary computer models of social behavior to inject content into the global attention stream at just the right moment, hoping to steer the social dynamics to a desired outcome.
"The group is very image-conscious, much like a corporation," said a U.S. intelligence official involved in monitoring Isis's media operations.
