Seven Generational Ruminations

Four and a half years ago I wrote about: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate. The Total Information Awareness (TIA) project had just been revealed, and this was before the harumphing that later drove the program underground. The goal of the TIA was to bring together a variety of technologies such as datamining, language translation, sparse data analysis, and use those technologies to drastically increase the ability of U.S. Government spooks to know what's going on. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks "they" claimed to want better ability to predict and prevent the next terrorist attack. But at the same time the whole program just seemed like the reincarnation of Big Brother.