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On April 27, 1773, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act. It was a bill designed to reduce to amount of tea from East India Company to prevent them form bankruptcy. Colonists viewed the act as another taxation tyranny. This led up to the Boston Tea Party, the dumping of 18,000 pounds in the Boston Harbor by colonists in 1773 to protest the Tea Act.

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The Townshend Acts were a series of measures, passed by the British Parliament in 1767, that taxed goods imported to the American colonies. But American colonists, who had no representation in Parliament, saw the Acts as an abuse of power. The British sent troops to America to enforce the unpopular new laws, further heightening tensions between Great Britain and the American colonies in the run-up to the American Revolutionary War.

The British Crown emerged victorious from the French and Indian War in 1763, but defending the North American colonies from French expansion had proved tremendously costly to England.

Compared to Great Britain's debts, the cost of the French and Indian War to the colonists had been slight. The colonists-who arguably enjoyed a higher standard of living at the time than their British counterparts-paid less than one-twentieth the taxes of British citizens living in England.

The British government thought the colonists should help pay the cost of their protection. The British Parliament enacted a series of taxes on the colonies for the purpose of raising revenue. Early attempts, such as the Stamp Act of 1765-which taxed colonists for every piece of paper they used-were met with widespread protests in America.

Townshend Duties

The Townshend Acts, named after Charles Townshend, British chancellor of the Exchequer, imposed duties on British china, glass, lead, paint, paper and tea imported to the colonies.

Benjamin Franklin had informed the British Parliament that the colonies intended to start manufacturing their own goods rather than paying duties on imports. These particular items were chosen for taxation because Townshend thought they would be difficult things for the colonists to produce on their own. He estimated the duties would raise approximately 40,000 pounds, with most of the revenue coming from tea.

While the original intent of the import duties had been to raise revenue, Charles Townshend saw the policies as a way to remodel colonial governments. The Townshend Acts would use the revenue raised by the duties to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges, ensuring the loyalty of America's governmental officials to the British Crown. However, these policies prompted colonists to take action by boycotting British goods.

Charles Townshend didn't live to see the measures enacted. He died suddenly in September 1767, before the detrimental effects of his signature rules could materialize.

Townshend Act Protests

The Townshend duties went into effect on November 20, 1767, close on the heels of the Declaratory Act of 1766, which stated that British Parliament had the same authority to tax the American colonies as they did in Great Britain. By December, two widely circulated documents had united colonists in favor of a boycott of British goods.

These influential pamphlets included "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania," a series of essays written by Pennsylvania legislator John Dickinson and the "Massachusetts Circular Letter," a statement written by Samuel Adams and James Otis Jr. and passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives to other colonial legislatures.

With the help of the Sons of Liberty-a secret society of American business leaders who coined the phrase "taxation without representation"-24 towns in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island agreed to boycott British goods in January 1768.

With the exception of necessities, such as fishing hooks and wire, New England merchants agreed not to import British goods for one year. New York followed suit in April, with an even more restrictive non-importation agreement.

In response to protests and boycotts, the British sent troops to occupy Boston and quell the unrest.

Repeal of the Townshend Acts

By 1769, more than 2,000 British troops had arrived in Boston to restore order-a large number considering only about 16,000 people lived in Boston at the time.

Skirmishes between patriot colonists and British soldiers-as well as colonists loyal to the British Crown-became increasingly common. To protest taxes, patriots often vandalized stores selling British goods and intimidated store merchants and their customers.

Tensions between the colonists and British troops finally boiled over on March 5, 1770, when British soldiers shot into an angry mob, killing five American colonists in an event known as the Boston Massacre.

Little did the colonists or British soldiers know that across the ocean on the same day as the Boston Massacre, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Lord North, had asked Parliament to repeal the Townshend Acts.

All of the Townshend Acts-except for the tax on tea-were repealed in April 1770. The tax on tea would remain a flashpoint and a contributing factor to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, in which angry colonists destroyed an entire shipment of tea in Boston Harbor. To quell resistant and punish the colonists-particularly the demonstrators in Boston-Parliament passed The Coercive Acts of 1774, which colonists referred to as the Intolerable Acts. The four Intolerable Acts included the Massachusetts Government Act, instituting an appointed government over the previously-elected, local one; the Boston Port Bill closing Boston Harbor; the Administration of Justice Act, which dictated that British officials could be tried in another colony or in England if charged with capital offenses; and the Quartering Act, which said unoccupied buildings could be used to quarter British troops. The combined force of these acts culminated in the American Revolution, which was kicked off when the " shot heard round the world" was fired on April 19, 1775, at the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

SOURCES

Charles Townshend (1725-1767); The Colonia Williamsburg Foundation.
Townshend Acts; Boston Tea Party Museum.
What we get wrong about taxes and the American Revolution. PBS News Hour. 2016.

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The Townshend Acts were a series of unpopular measures, passed by the British Parliament in 1767, that taxed goods imported to the American colonies. The laws heightened the tensions between Great Britain and the American colonists and were a precursor to the Revolutionary War.

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The Townshend Acts are series of laws enacted by Parliament in 1767, establishing indirect taxes on goods imported from Great Britain by British colonies in North America. Many Americans viewed this Act as a way to get power, eventually making British limit the importing of their goods.

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Staff, History.com. "The Boston Massacre." www.history.com. (2009). Web. 5 October 2016.

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Often remembered from the poem "The Midnight Ride" written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He brought news of Britain who was soon to invade the town of Lexington, Massachusetts.

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Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts Boston/Wikipedia

I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the newfangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty's subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of "metadata" in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely "sifting through this so-called metadata" and that the "information acquired does not include the content of any communications". I will show how we can use this metadata to find key persons involved in terrorist groups operating within the Colonies at the present time. I shall also endeavour to show how these methods work in what might be called a relational manner.

The analysis in this report is based on information gathered by our field agent Mr David Hackett Fischer and published in an Appendix to his lengthy report to the government. As you may be aware, Mr Fischer is an expert and respected field Agent with a broad and deep knowledge of the Colonies. I, on the other hand, have made my way from Ireland with just a little quantitative training-I placed several hundred rungs below the Senior Wrangler during my time at Cambridge-and I am presently employed as a junior analytical scribe at ye olde National Security Agency. Sorry, I mean the Royal Security Administration. And I should emphasize again that I know nothing of current affairs in the Colonies. However, our current 18 th century beta of PRISM has been used to collect and analyze information on more than two hundred and sixty persons (of varying degrees of suspicion) belonging variously to seven different organizations in the Boston area.

Rest assured that we only collected metadata on these people, and no actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed. All I know is whether someone was a member of an organization or not. Surely this is but a small encroachment on the freedom of the Crown's subjects. I have been asked, on the basis of this poor information, to present some names for our field agents in the Colonies to work with. It seems an unlikely task.

Here is what the data look like.

The organizations are listed in the columns and the names in the rows. As you can see, membership is represented by a 1. So this Samuel Adams person (whoever he is) belongs to the North Caucus, the Long Room Club, the Boston Committee, and the London Enemies List. I must say, these organizational names sound rather belligerent.

Anyway, what can get from these meagre metadata? This table is large and cumbersome. I am a pretty low-level operative at ye olde RSA, so I have to keep it simple. My superiors, I am quite sure, have far more sophisticated analytical techniques at their disposal. I will simply start at the very beginning and follow a technique laid out in a beautiful paper by my brilliant former colleague, Mr Ron Breiger, called " The Duality of Persons and Groups." He wrote it as a graduate student at Harvard, some thirty-five years ago. (Harvard, you may recall, is what passes for a university in the Colonies. No matter.) The paper describes what we now think of as a basic way to represent information about links between people and some other kind of thing, like attendance at various events or membership in various groups. The foundational papers in this new science of social networke analysis, in fact, are almost all about what you can tell about people and their social lives based on metadata only, without much reference to the actual content of what they say.

Mr Breiger's insight was that our table of 254 rows and seven columns is an adjacency matrix, and that a bit of matrix multiplication can bring out information that is in the table but perhaps hard to see. Take this adjacency matrix of people and groups and transpose it-that is, flip it over on its side, so that the rows are now the columns and vice versa. Now we have two tables, or matrices, one showing "People by Groups" and the other "Groups by People". Call the first one the adjacency matrix A and the second one its transpose, A T. Now, as you will recall there are rules for multiplying matrices together. If you multiply out A(A T), you will get a big matrix with 254 rows and 254 columns. That is, it will be a 254x254 "Person by Person" matrix, where both the rows and columns are people (in the same order) and the cells show the number of organizations any particular pair of people both belonged to. Is that not marvelous? I have always thought this operation is somewhat akin to magick, especially as it involves moving one hand down and the other one across in a manner not wholly removed from an incantation.

I cannot show you the whole Person by Person matrix, because I would have to kill you. I jest, I jest! It is just because it is rather large. But here is a little snippet of it. At this point in the 18 th century, a 254x254 matrix is what we call Bigge Data. I have an upcoming EDWARDx talk about it. You should come. Anyway:

You can see here that Mr Appleton and Mr John Adams were connected through both being a member of one group, while Mr John Adams and Mr Samuel Adams shared memberships in two of our seven groups. Mr Ash, meanwhile, was not connected through organization membership to any of the first four men on our list. The rest of the table stretches out in both directions.

Notice again, I beg you, what we did there. We did not start with a "social networke" as you might ordinarily think of it, where individuals are connected to other individuals. We started with a list of memberships in various organizations. But now suddenly we do have a social network of individuals, where a tie in the network is defined by co-membership in an organization. This is a powerful trick.

We are just getting started, however. A thing about multiplying matrices is that the order matters. It is not like multiplying two numbers. If instead of multiplying A(A T) we put the transposed matrix first, and do A T(A), then we get a different result. This time, the result is a 7x7 "Organization by Organization" matrix, where the numbers in the cells represent how many people each organization has in common. Here's what that looks like. Because it is small, we can see the whole table.

Again, interesting! (I beg to venture.) Instead of seeing how (and which) people are linked by their shared membership in organizations, we see which organizations are linked through the people that belong to them both. People are linked through the groups they belong to. Groups are linked through the people they share. This is the "duality of persons and groups" in the title of Mr Breiger's article.

Rather than relying on tables, we can make a picture of the relationship between the groups, using the number of shared members as an index of the strength of the link between the seditious groups. Here's what that looks like.

And, of course, we can also do that for the links between the people, using our 254x254 "Person by Person" table. Here is what that looks like.

What a nice picture! The analytical engine has arranged everyone neatly, picking out clusters of individuals and also showing both peripheral individuals and-more intriguingly-people who seem to bridge various groups in ways that might perhaps be relevant to national security. Look at that person right in the middle there. Zoom in if you wish. He seems to bridge several groups in an unusual (though perhaps not unique) way. His name is Paul Revere.

Once again, I remind you that I know nothing of Mr Revere, or his conversations, or his habits or beliefs, his writings (if he has any), or his personal life. All I know is this bit of metadata, based on membership in some organizations. And yet my analytical engine, on the basis of absolutely the most elementary of operations in Social Networke Analysis, seems to have picked him out of our 254 names as being of unusual interest. We do not have to stop here, with just a picture. Now that we have used our simple "Person by Event" table to generate a "Person by Person" matrix, we can do things like calculate centrality scores, or figure out whether there are cliques, or investigate other patterns. For example, we could calculate a betweenness centrality measure for everyone in our matrix, which is roughly the number of "shortest paths" between any two people in our network that pass through the person of interest. It is a way of asking, "If I have to get from Person A to Person Z, how likely is it that the quickest way is through Person X?" Here are the top betweenness scores for our list of suspected terrorists:

Perhaps I should not say terrorists so rashly. But you can see how tempting it is. Anyway, look-there he is again, this Mr Revere! Very interesting. There are fancier ways to measure importance in a network besides this one. There is something called eigenvector centrality, which my friends in Natural Philosophy tell me is a bit of mathematics unlikely ever to have any practical application in the wider world. You can think of it as a measure of centrality weighted by one's connection to other central people. Here are our top scorers on that measure:

Here our Mr Revere appears to score highly alongside a few other persons of interest. And for one last demonstration, a calculation of Bonacich Power Centrality, another more sophisticated measure. Here the lower score indicates a more central location.

And here again, Mr Revere-along with Messrs Urann, Proctor, and Barber-appear towards the top of our list.

So there you have it. From a table of membership in different groups we have gotten a picture of a kind of social networke between individuals, a sense of the degree of connection between organizations, and some strong hints of who the key players are in this world. And all this-all of it!-from the merest sliver of metadata about a single modality of relationship between people. I do not wish to overstep the remit of my memorandum, but I must ask you to imagine what might be possible if we were but able to collect information on very many more people and also synthesize information from different kinds of ties between people! For the simple methods I have described are quite generalizable in these ways, and their capability only becomes more apparent as the size and scope of the information they are given increases. We would not need to know what was being whispered between individuals, only that they were connected in various ways. The analytical engine would do the rest! I daresay the shape of the real structure of social relations would emerge from our calculations gradually, first in outline only, but eventually with ever-increasing clarity and, at last, in beautiful detail-like a great, silent ship coming out of the gray New England fog.

I admit that, in addition to the possibilities for finding something interesting, there may also be the prospect of discovering suggestive but ultimately incorrect or misleading patterns. But I feel this problem would surely be greatly ameliorated by more and better metadata. At the present time, alas, the technology required to automatically collect the required information is beyond our capacity. But I say again, if a mere scribe such as I-one who knows nearly nothing-can use the very simplest of these methods to pick the name of a traitor like Paul Revere from those of two hundred and fifty four other men, using nothing but a list of memberships and a portable calculating engine, then just think what weapons we might wield in the defense of liberty one or two centuries from now.
This article originally appeared Read more on Slate about the NSA's secret snooping programs. on Kieran Healy's blog.

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I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the newfangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty's subjects.

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Born into slavery, but later on he managed to escape for good. It is unclear whether or not Attucks was the first person to fall the Boston Massacre. No one knows if he is of the African American or Native American ethnicity. Although, he was classified as a slave.

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Crispus Attucks - Facts, Boston Massacre & American Revolution

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Crispus Attucks was an African American man killed during the Boston Massacre and believed to be the first casualty of the American Revolution.

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This event occurred on March 5, 1770. It was a clash between the civilians of Boston and the soldiers of Great Britain. Three people were killed instantly and two died later from their fatal injuries. The colonists grew angry due to the tyranny of British laws.