news: Govt to track personal data

"Is Big Brother Our Only Hope Against Bin Laden?"
Salon.com (12/03/02); Manjoo, Farhad

The U.S. Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is an ambitious effort to collate all personal data--business transactions, relationships, registrations, etc.--on foreigners and citizens in an effort to spot suspicious activity that could precede a terrorist attack. The technical problems of implementing it are formidable: To know virtually everything, a practical impossibility, requires a massive amount of data; database integration difficulties will complicate deployment, while keeping track of databases will also be troublesome; and TIA's mandate to monitor seemingly normal activities that may be statistically construed as possible preparation for a terrorist incident--in real time, no less--could generate many false positives. This raises the question of whether the system should narrow its focus to time-honored terrorist characteristics, or follow more generalized behavior patterns in order to thwart new kinds of attacks. Stanford University computer scientist Jeffrey Ullman, for one, thinks TIA is essential to civilization's survival, because information technology has the potential to root out evil and shield personal freedom. Other researchers are hopeful that federally supported programs such as TIA will result in more overall research funding. However, civil libertarians are calling the project an invasion of privacy, and are also displeased in the appointment of former national security advisor John Poindexter to lead the program for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is sponsoring TIA development. Meanwhile, statistician Bobby Gladd sees the project as a waste of time and resources that could be put to better use in furthering information analysis. Nevertheless, computer scientists believe TIA could be acceptable to the public, as long as its technology and policies are publicly debated, and its policymakers are trustworthy.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/12/03/tia/index_np.html