Total Information Awareness
- August 09, 2002
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According to this post on Way.Nu, DARPA is working on building a next generation information handling system called Total Information Awareness or TIA. It will “capture, cross index and maintain pedabytes of information (i.e. 1,000s of terabytes) and will include automated ‘cognitive aids’.”
The EFF is worried that this will not be a good thing because not only will it not be able to detect terrorist threats in time, it will enable the government to spy on regular citizens and activists like Martin Luther King.
This is a pretty weak argument against TIA, because if the government could spy on regular citizens, why couldn’t they spy on suspected terrorists? I don’t necessarily think that TIA is a good thing, but I don’t think it will become the incarnation of Orwell’s 1984 either.
Find more information about TIA at DARPA’s Web site.