The Office of Information Awareness
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Be afraid. Be very afraid. Total Information Awareness may be coming soon to a theatre near you. |
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There’s a lot of rhetoric around “TIA”, including William Safire’s slightly misleading editorial “You Are a Suspect” in today’s New York Times (use this to anonymize your registration). The scariest thing, I think, is not that this system might work, but that it might even be attempted. Although it would certainly further compromise our eroding constitutional (privacy) rights, it would also represent a terrible waste of money and security resources.
Although I would have preferred for Minority Report to answer the question, “Would we want a system of total surveillance if it worked perfectly?”, instead it answered the question, “Would we want a system of total surveillance if it made errors?” The first question is more difficult, the second more realistic. And it’s this latter question that applies particularly to Admiral John Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” and related programs. This technology may work fairly well in Hollywood, but in practice, has anyone ever maintained a database even remotely this large with any semblance of accuracy?
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The Office of Information Awareness sounds an awful lot like the Office of Information Retrieval to me. |