This needs to go alongside the NY Times article about the Bush Adm's rollback of Clinton Adm's Medical Records Privacy Protections. I honestly don't know which left field the Bush Adm is coming from this stuff is so nutters. I know one thing. Their motivations, the true ones, are quite secret. What we are seeing are shadows on the back wall of Plato's Cave.
Feds Open 'Total' Tech Spy System [Slashdot]
Diesel Dave writes "A Wired article reports: 'On Wednesday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will begin awarding contracts for the design and implementation of a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system...The Total Information Awareness program, with its ability to provide persistent storage of everything from credit card, to employment, to medical, to ISP records, is a recipe for civil liberties disaster unless there are provisions for citizens to find out who is looking at their records and to see and correct those records.' The foundation for the omnipotent National ID database has now been laid."
This from the Wired article (http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,54342,00.html) itself:
[...]
On Wednesday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will begin awarding contracts for the design and implementation of a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system.
It's a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures -- clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards -- and decode them prior to an assault. It's a task, the Information Awareness Office (IAO) says, that is beyond "our current intelligent infrastructure and other government agencies."
TIA program directors make it clear they also believe the task to be beyond current technology, noting that they are primarily interested in revolutionary advances in science, technology or systems and "development of collaboration, automation and cognitive aids technologies that allow humans and machines to think together about complicated and complex problems."
So insistent are they on building a better mousetrap -- or, more accurately, a brand new terrorist trap -- that they have officially warned potential contractors that not a dime will be invested in "research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to existing technology."
Color me stupid or something, but I know some folks who work with computational linguistics at MIT. They have been busting their asses and STILL the parsing ability and AI technology is so far from ready for prime time that we are seeing none of it in these so-called "parental filters" or built-in "flame warning" indicators in email programs. Google is as good as we got right now, I'd expect, and it is far less myterious than it used to be.
SO WHAT THE FUCK would the GOVERNMENT think they can improve by throwing all that work out and starting over??!! The Government? Maybe they should put the FBI in charge of it. We all know what technical wizards they are. Yeah, that's the ticket. Have the FBI, with their fabulous people skills and understanding of the cultural contexts of language, let them reinvent computational linguistics and AI. Sure, go right ahead, BOZOS.
6:45:28 PM 
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