SCI/TECH: Pentagon criticized on high-tech spying

The Defense Department should have been more sensitive to concerns about potential government abuses of privacy from its highly criticized research project to predict terrorist attacks, the agency's inspector general has concluded.



The report said the potential for U.S. police agencies to use the technology investigating citizens "has raised the effort to an unnecessarily heightened level of awareness and concern for both Congress and the public."

Congress previously killed the Pentagon's vast computerized terrorism surveillance project, known as the Total Information Awareness project, but renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness after criticism.

www.cnn.com...

[Edited on 1-1-2004 by SkepticOverlord]

"The most controversial research would have involved U.S. analysts studying past terror attacks and imagining future ones by producing a list of telltale actions terrorists might take in preparing attacks. These actions could include recently arriving from the Mideast, taking flying lessons and buying boxcutters...

...Such telltale actions could be detected by scanning a huge number of computer databases -- credit card records, travel data, housing and medical information -- held privately or by governments here and abroad."

But why would anyone but terrorists be concerned? Some speculate that any number of seemingly innoccuous activities, like renting a copy of Jodie Foster's Little Foxes, might place you on a list of possible Presidential assassigns. The extension to all of law enforcement is plausible... Ask Rush Limbaugh how many different doctor visits it takes to render one "Doctor Shopping" and how easy it is to access medical records already.

Yet the criticism and concerns were in place from the start, and the emergence of the IAO's intitial logo... an all-seeing eye overlooking the entire world!



And the offical justification for the logo apears even more ominous to some than the all-seeing eye itself!

For the record, the IAO logo was designed to convey the mission of that office; i.e., to imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate, and transition information technologies, components, and prototype, closed-loop information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption, national security warning, and national security decision making. On an elemental level, the logo is the representation of the office acronym (IAO) the eye above the pyramid represents "I" the pyramid represents "A," and the globe represents "O." In the detail, the eye scans the globe for evidence of terrorist planning and is focused on the part of the world that was the source of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "Scientia est polentia" means "Knowledge is power."

Source: Question 15 in the IAO Frequently Asked Questions
document dated February, 2003 which can be accessed
at www.darpa.mil...

If knowledge is power, is total knowledge absolute corrupted power?

I think that's "scientia est potentia", "scientia est polenta" means "Knowledge is a corn cake", probably not what they meant.


I especially like one thing about it - look at the TIA logo really closely, and you'll see that the eye is looking at North America.

That's weird the number of replies on this thread says it's -3. This is one old post! 2004.