He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
-- "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"
Let us discuss something that everyone may have forgotten...and which people probably do not realize has a very great effect on what's happening today. As is usual for what I write about, it will probably not be very pleasant.
The Information Awareness Office was instituted by DARPA in 2002, designed to bring together several projects already underway at DARPA involving the use of surveillance and information technology to monitor and track...well, threats against the state. Like terrorists. Everyone hates terrorists. You can read all about it at Wikipedia. It was full of fascinating things that completely demolished privacy, like Human ID At A Distance and Scalable Social Network Analysis. All of these combined to create what was called Total Information Awareness. I will quote directly from Wikipedia for this one:
The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to
revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and
identify foreign terrorists – and decipher their plans – and thereby
enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat
terrorist acts.
To that end, the TIA program objective is to create a counter-terrorism information system that:
1. Increases information coverage by an order of magnitude, and affords easy future scaling
2. Provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed
3. Automatically queues analysts based on partial pattern matches and
has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist
attacks
4. Supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information
sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and
mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can
effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and
prospective courses of action.
It was a masterpiece of surveillance. Naturally, the whole idea of this huge invasion of privacy was anathema to the citizens of the US at that time, since they saw that the whole thing could be, well, used against them against of against putative terrorists. After a suitable amount of outcry, the IAO and TIA were shut down. Some of the more useful projects that made up the IAO were renamed, but it all mostly went away.
Or so everyone thought.
Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you.
-- The Police, "Every Breath You Take"
What actually happened is that all of the defense contractors that were working on the TIA were all let go and then immediately re-hired as all of the TIA projects were privatized. Most of it went over to Booz Allen and other national security contracters, which is unsurprising. We then began bringing it back piecemeal into the alphabet bureaucracies. It began to be inserted into the commericial enterprises of our consumer society. People know various parts of it by various names: PRISM, the NSA Data Center, and so on.
But frankly, the whole kit-and-kaboodle doesn't need to hide anymore. Total Information Awareness is back from the black budget and here to stay. Don't you feel safer now?
Just food for thought.
