RENAMING the Orwellian-sounding Total Information Awareness project hasn鈥檛 won the Bush administration any more friends. Critics say the Terrorism Information Awareness programme still allows the US government an unprecedented window on every citizen鈥檚 life 鈥� and risks causing miscarriages of justice.
Last week, the Pentagon鈥檚 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency defended the programme in a report to Congress, after intense criticism from privacy advocates led to the name change. The $53 million project aims to develop technology that 鈥渕ines鈥� intelligence files and publicly available data for suspicious patterns in credit card bills, phone records, airline reservations, online news reports and other sources. The plan is to develop several systems, including 鈥渟ocial network analysis鈥� software that could identify terrorist sleeper cells, and alert authorities when they shift into gear.
DARPA says such a system might have sounded the alarm before the 11 September hijacks. The agency is even looking for an automated way of identifying people at a distance with security cameras, for instance by analysing the way they walk (New 杏吧原创, 4 December 1999, p 18).
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But critics worry more about the government spying on US citizens. Jim Dempsey, a director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington DC, says a powerful data-mining tool could compile vast tomes on individual citizens, and falsely implicate many of them as terrorists. 鈥淲e鈥檙e worried about due process and fairness. How do you tell the computer it鈥檚 wrong?鈥� he asks.
Another new DARPA project has amplified concerns. Called LifeLog, it aims to be an extended memory of a suspect鈥檚 entire life, filing and correlating emails, phone calls, conversations, and things people have seen and heard. But development on this is still at a very preliminary stage.