According to Carlton Vogt unless you have been living in a cave, you’re aware of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme. My cave has an internet connection so I can blog about it eventually. Although the news about it has already been round the blogosphere I liked Mr Vogt’s article.
The goal of TIA is to accumulate every bit of transactional online data worldwide and use data mining techniques to provide intelligence information. This means TIA will give the Pentagon access to your credit card data, school records, medical information, travel history, church affiliation, gun ownership, ammunition purchases, library records, video rentals, you name it:
“This will all be collected into a database, the purpose of which is ostensibly to fight terrorism, but which will present a massive opportunity for government abuse. There comes a point in almost every science fiction “B” movie where someone suggests that the new invention can be beneficial, but will be dangerous if “it falls into the wrong hands.”
The problem is that this technology has not only fallen into the wrong hands, it was conceived by “the wrong hands.” The chief architect of this new data gathering and mining scheme is none other than John Poindexter:
“Those who are old enough will remember him from the arms-for-hostages scandal, in which many of the arms currently threatening us in the Middle East were illegally traded to Iran by the Reagan administration.Poindexter subsequently was convicted of several felonies, including conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The convictions were later overturned on a technicality. The disgraced former admiral re-entered public life this year as a civilian Pentagon employee.”
InfoWorld deals mainly with computer and technology related news or issues. It was most encouraging to read the following analysis by one of the senior editors in his regular column Ethics Matters:
“We are in the midst of vast fundamental changes in the body of rights, legal and moral, that we have taken for granted for so long. I am constantly amazed at how passively most people have accepted these changes, which will affect the way we live and work. It is a dangerous path on which false beginnings and missteps along the way can end in disaster.If we scroll down to the bottom line, we find that the TIA project places too much information on too many people into the hands of too few people with too little oversight. It portends disaster.
…We have the opportunity to put the brakes on here before the situation becomes that grave. Perhaps it’s time for people to shake off their post-9/11 stupor and find out what mischief is being done under the guise of fighting terrorism. You may not like what you see.”
Absolutely. The state is not your friend.
I created my own version of the TIA logo:
Link
If the link above doesn’t work, here’s the URL: http://www.aubreyturner.org/archives/000110.html#000110
How about this quote from a recent Government Accounting Office report:
Although GAO’s current analyses of audit and evaluation reports for the 24 major departments and agencies issued from October 2001 to October 2002 indicate some individual agency improvements, overall they continue to highlight significant information security weaknesses that place a broad array of federal operations and assets at risk of fraud, misuse, and disruption.
In the name of accuracy… I would point out that there is no program such as the media and those who have gotten their info through the inaccurate filters of the media have reported.
What there *IS*, is a proposal to have DARPA fund a number of university research programs, using mostly (if not all) artificial data to see if the tools necessary to build such a system in the future could be developed.
I have no problems with research; there is nothing about this idea which is military specific and we’ll probably see most of the ideas in Open Source Software long before the first attempt to take a real programme to the US Congress occurs.
We’ve got *YEARS* to block this thing.
Also, note that Poindexter’s role is strictly as a manager of a DARPA research project. He has nothing to do with collection of real data (which isn’t part of the programme) or analysis of real data (which isn’t part of the programme) and is certainly not in line for running any agency that might, assuming we don’t block it, deploy such a system in a time frame of 5-10 years from now.
THERE IS NO AGENCY. THIS IS A BUNCH OF UNIVERSITY RESEARCH GRANTS FOLKS.
Thanks for that clarification, Dale. Y’know, folks, I think we should be thankful that this has been proposed out in the open, rather than as a “black op”.
When I hear “Total Information Awareness” I think about 900 FBI files.
Mrs Du Toit did some analysis of this from a techy point of view and came to the conclusion that it was technically impossible given the scale of the data storage required and the length of time it would take to retrieve anything.
A Non: I am sure that is the case. Although the research grants are presumably to find some way to mine the data so it’s doable. My problem is that the state is trying to do such a thing in the first place. That’s Big Brother instincts taking over.
Every time I get a raft of spam for stuff I couldn’t possibly need, I’m reminded of the quality of “data mining”.
Go ahead and bring on the database, DARPA. We’ll just spam your sorry little fileservers til they choke.
Very interesting