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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (57310)	11/15/2002 2:27:44 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 281500

FL~ if the TIA program is specifically designed to "... revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists..." then I respectfully submit that this subject should be considered part of a FA discussion. Unfortunately, terrorism has been part of our foreign policy for some time. And I personally think there should be some limits set in this TIA program. You are right~~ there certainly have been excesses before the last administration...(thinking of Hoover here)... To say nothing of the fact that Administrations come and go...but the government workers tend to stay. Thinking of Robert Hansen here. I think that the TIA program will have to have some curbs, and frankly, I'm surprised that people, no matter whatever political party they subscribe to, aren't becoming more vocal about it. Message 18236268 From LB's post from "Reason" Poindexter's Laboratory The know-it-all plan to fight terrorism By Jacob Sullum >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>"We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," John Poindexter recently told The Washington Post. Maybe, if the next person happens to be J. Edgar Hoover. Poindexter, a former national security adviser, now heads the Information Awareness Office (IAO), a new division of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This obscure little office with a blandly creepy name has a grand mission: Total Information Awareness?in a word, omniscience. "The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program," the IAO's Web site explains, "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." Accordingly, the IAO is developing hardware and software to look for suspicious patterns in vast collections of information, including travel itineraries, credit card purchases, bank accounts, e-mail messages, Web site visits, and medical records. That's where you come in. You're probably not a terrorist, but the government can't be sure until it puts your information in a huge, centralized database, where Poindexter's computers can sniff it over. You haven't visited any terrorist havens, purchased books about weapons, read subversive online propaganda, or undergone plastic surgery lately, have you? No need to answer?the government will know soon enough if Poindexter's vision is realized. As he put it in a speech he gave this year, "We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options." Given the amount of data Poindexter wants to collect, the government would be not just mining but strip mining, scooping up huge piles of information in the hope of finding a useful nugget. "By definition, they're going to send highly sensitive, personal data," noted a computer scientist interviewed by the Post. "How many innocent people are going to get falsely pinged? How many terrorists are going to slip through?"<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<