March 10, 2008
Total Information Awareness by any other name
still stinks like the unreasonable search and seizure that it is:
Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city — for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans — the government’s spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.
The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.
The information doesn’t generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone’s location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.
Not much here is news to me, but it’s interesting to see it in the Wall Street Journal.
I doubt there’s enough tinfoil on the planet to make hats for all of us.
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4 Responses to “Total Information Awareness by any other name”
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Ah, yes, and the beauty part of the war on terrorism (like the war on drugs, un-like a declared war on a specified nation or nations) is that it goes on and on and on and on.
Sheila, if we’re lucky, the war in Iraq will last another 100 years.
Well, ever since I was fifteen years old we’ve been flinging away our right to privacy and filling up prisons in the name of the war on drugs, so I’d say it’s a good bet.
(Oh, and tossing our tax dollars down the pneumatic tube to Colombia — but don’t get me started. I’m just sitting here thinking about barbecue and salivating.)
Sounds like something out of the new BBC series The Last Enemy, where they have something called TIA, a DB that links to all of the DB in real time.