the power of Data . Data plays दाता (the giver)

 Daataa or dAtA, in Sanskrit is "the giver"  (as in Giver of food (anna-dAtA अन्नदाता).

 Data gives and data destroys. Read that as you will. It is all an illusion anyway. Maya. 

 The two ancient concepts of Maya and Leela keep coming back to me.The words translate as Illusion and  Play - the  Theatre of the Gods.  

It is these that can be best applied to  today's technology driven American world. A world where technology  seems to empower people so much that they believe that they can play God. That they are Gods playing out their little leelas. The Games  of controlling the masses.   

 Obama's victory and robotic warfare in the near future have one common thread. Data and its mining. The belief that knowledge gives power to those who own it and know how to exploit it. Those who will do anything to prevent it 'falling' into other hands. Think of Manning and Assange.  Freedom of Information is just rhetoric . Freedom  will not be allowed to be free and accessible to all. It will just be used against them. 

That data mined knowledge might have given Obama a second term  but will it deliver the control and domination that  the knowledgeable ones seek?

That is an open question with no clear and definite answer. 

That data-driven decision making played a huge role in creating a second term for the 44th President and will be one of the more closely studied elements of the 2012 cycle. It’s another sign that the role of the campaign pros in Washington who make decisions on hunches and experience is rapidly dwindling, being replaced by the work of quants and computer coders who can crack massive data sets for insight. As one official put it, the time of “guys sitting in a back room smoking cigars, saying ‘We always buy 60 Minutes’” is over. In politics, the era of big data has arrived.

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2Biqw4DMv

To pacify a determined guerrilla resistance that persisted in the Philippines for a decade after 1898, the U.S. colonial regime — unlike European empires with their cultural studies of “Oriental civilizations” — used these advanced information technologies to amass detailed empirical data on Philippine society.  In this way, they forged an Argus-eyed security apparatus that played a major role in crushing the Filipino nationalist movement. The resulting colonial policing and surveillance system would also leave a lasting institutional imprint on the emerging American state.

When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, the “father of U.S. military intelligence” Colonel Ralph Van Deman drew upon security methods he had developed years before in the Philippines to found the Army’s Military Intelligence Division.  He recruited a staff that quickly grew from one (himself) to 1,700, deployed some 300,000 citizen-operatives to compile more than a million pages of surveillance reports on American citizens, and laid the foundations for a permanent domestic surveillance apparatus.

The Global War on Terror          

As it found itself at the edge of defeat in the attempted pacification of two complex societies, Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington responded in part by adapting new technologies of electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and drone warfare — all of which are now melding into what may become an information regime far more powerful and destructive than anything that has come before. 

By 2020, this new defense architecture should theoretically be able to integrate space, cyberspace, and terrestrial combat through robotics for — so the claims go — the delivery of seamless information for lethal action. Significantly, both space and cyberspace are new, unregulated domains of military conflict, largely beyond international law.  And Washington hopes to use both, without limitation, as Archimedean levers to exercise new forms of global dominion far into the twenty-first century, just as the British Empire once ruled from the seas and the Cold War American imperium exercised its global reach via airpower.

As Washington seeks to surveil the globe from space, the world might well ask: Just how high is national sovereignty?

As early as 2020, the Pentagon hopes to patrol the entire globe ceaselessly, relentlessly via a triple canopy space shield reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, driven by drones armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, monitored through a telescopic panopticon, and operated by robotic controls. 

For a new global optic, DARPA is building the wide-angle Space Surveillance Telescope (SST), which could be sited at bases ringing the globe for a quantum leap in “space surveillance.”  The system would allow future space warriors to see the whole sky wrapped around the entire planet while seated before a single screen, making it possible to track every object in Earth orbit.

Complicating the future further, the illusion of information omniscience might incline Washington to more military misadventures akin to Vietnam or Iraq, creating the possibility of yet more expensive, draining conflicts, from Iran to the South China Sea. 

If the future of America’s world power is shaped by actual events rather than long-term economic trends, then its fate might well be determined by which comes first in this century-long cycle: military debacle from the illusion of technological mastery, or a new technological regime powerful enough to perpetuate U.S. global dominion.

http://warincontext.org/2012/11/08/alfred-mccoy-super-weapons-and-global-dominion/#more-46939