Posted on 05/20/2003 10:37:39 AM PDT by FreeRadical
Edited on 06/29/2004 7:09:52 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program!
The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable.
(Excerpt) Read more at wired.com ...
In fact your stellar performance has so disturbed my train of thought, I can't even remember what the article was about. Good job, keep up the good work.
First of all, exactly how is the Pentagon going to acquire this data? If you pay cash, no data trail. If you pay with a credit card, the only information available is the store, the date and the amount of the purchase. How is purchase-level data going to be captured and transmitted?
And second, the Pentagon can't even keep track of its civilian contractors. How the heck does it expect to create a multi-petabyte database with a data collection structure far more complicated than anything currently in existence?
A bagel?? Not likely.
Otherwise, a thought-provoking read. Although it doesn't seem possible that DARPA can accumulate the data necessary for this scheme, they think they can. Hmmmmm...
Just go paperless. Infrastructure and consumer conditioning are proceeding quickly.
If you pay with a credit card, the only information available is the store, the date and the amount of the purchase.
That's the easiest one to solve. Just pass a law. With a stroke of the pen, gvoernment can force credit card/debit companies and retailers to record and report all transaction data.
How the heck does it expect to create a multi-petabyte database with a data collection structure far more complicated than anything currently in existence?
Tax you to pay smart people to solve the problem of how to spy on you.
Logistics will not pose a permanent barrier to this. Technical problems will be solved with enough time, additional laws and tax expenditures. It's only our willingness to place liberty over security that can stop this. Sadly, Americans no longer possess that trait. They'll submit to this and most of them won't even be bothered to know about it.
The Founders wasted their time.
Government programs take on a life of their own once they get sufficient momentum. Even the most useless of them are nearly impossible to kill once entrenched. The only chance there is (and it is very slim) to stop this program is to kill it while it's still just a sparkle in some megalomaniac's eye.
Let's see. The IRS can't even successfully implement systems where almost all the data they recieve has a common key (SSN, Tax ID). The Pentagon can't even keep track of their own contractors. The closest thing to TIA is a large direct marketing database - that is so poor at modelling that they are estatic with a two-percent response rate. The feds can dream about this system all they want, but the raw truth is that the best systems people in the private sector couldn't create this beast, let alone the feds with their sorry systems implementation record - and creating the ability to capture item purchase level data on every point of sale system in the country, along with the data feeds from 20 million businsesses to TIA, would be an IT project that would absolutely DWARF the Y2K preparations.
That and the minor detail that congress has put some serious chains on TIA lately.
Congress has already put a major damper on this project - and one of the laws was overkill in being a complete moratorium on government data mining. What is data mining? In my book a simple SQL query constitutes data mining. So Congress just managed to outlaw the use SQL queries by the fedgov pending further study. However, it's clear that the feds do need to do a better job working with the data they already have - but unfortuneately the over-reaction to TIA has hamstrung that pressing need.
The NSA had a phone recording of the hijackers talking about the World Trade Center three days before Sept. 11th.
They are making their own jobs harder to do.
Nah, I've narrowed it down to either "Competely Stupid" or "Ill-conceived."
Yep. They're trying to figure out how to drink from an open fire hydrant and DARPA wants to increase the water pressure.
But I also know that if something is physically possible (and this is) its just a matter of how bad you want it.
At one point not long ago our government's planes couldn't break the sound barrier. Shortly after they were stepping foot on the moon. It's just a matter of how bad they want it. And trust me, they want this one very very badly.
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