Finding the Face of Terror in Data
Op-Ed - John M. Poindexter, The New York Times, 10 September 2003
No need to wonder about e-privacy anymore - "The amount of data available to the [US] federal government far exceeds the human capacity to analyze it" - all your data belongs to Them.
Beyond data, there is prescience presumed. From the bits and bytes is conjured the logical lever for acceptance: data will "identify possible terrorists before they act". Knowing and defining parameters for possible terrorism is the unspoken dilemma; in the end perhaps too hard, so that the problem is political and social, not analytical. In the label of "possible" terrorist is the theft of the potential to not be called "terrorist". Your data calls you a terrorist. Or, your data does not call you a conservative, you are a possible socialist.
And so the declamation meant to assure: "One of the purposes of the [Terrorism Information Awareness - formerly "Total I A"] program, however, is to identify possible terrorists before they act. We will often not know the identities of the terrorists. The only way to detect these terrorists is to look for patterns of activity that are based on observations from past terrorist attacks as well as estimates about how terrorists will adapt to our measures to avoid detection."
Sighted at http://cryptome.org/tia-dots.htm
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