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Defense Department 'eDNA' Plan Withdrawn
An anonymous reader points out this report on News.com from Declan McCullagh of a far-reaching plan (now withdrawn) to curtail much online privacy through the use of biometric markers, excerpting "The idea involved creating secure areas of the Internet that could be accessed only if a user had such a marker, called eDNA, according to a report in Friday's New York Times." Perhaps they'll withdraw the plan to track everything you buy next. Update: 11/24 17:38 GMT by T : Here is the original New York Times report from John Markoff.
The DARPA web site http://www.darpa.mil/iao/ spells out their mission, including things like "Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance". Check out their logo, it looks like something from a James Bond movie.
Apparently SRI is the group who got paid $60k to have this workshop on creating eDNA and the idea was widely (and it sounds like pretty communally) denounced and essentially rejected as technically unworkable (problem-laden) not to mention problematic w.r.t. privacy issues.
Also, apparently there was a huge flame war over how to present the group's findings. The individual initially charged with this ended up being relieved (gratefully, I'm sure) of these duties. Gee, ya think it was because the people gathered together felt *the most* strongly about the total lack of privacy aspect of this? I am inclined to think this was most definitely the case.
Anyway, this all is a problem; so what, it won't be eDNA - but only because they couldn't (at this time) get the job done!
I also find it ironic that the name of this program was pitched as "eDNA" - the reason this made me smile but very wearily is that I keep lobbying against TIA and its assorted ramifications ------ and one of the arguments I use is that as soon as (a) our DNA can be cheaply decoded (it currently can be decoded by Craig Venter) && (b) the information decoded actually means something (i.e. there is still a ton of speculative work into which diseases each of the proteins correlates to and to what degree etc.) you gotta believe that your little double helix's meaning is going to be hard coded along with every snarky e-mail you ever sent, every time you laid yourself out on the line in an e-mail, every purchase you made, when you made it, what it was, what your medical - ENTIRE medical - history is etc. etc. etc.
To a previous poster: don't worry, son; I also am not sleeping. . .
Those who give up their power willingly deserve none.
Of course this whole Government DNA collection sounds scary, but they have been doing it to thier military members for years now. They take a sample of every members DNA and other Biometric information and keep it stored in a large database. It is considered the new high tech dog-tags. I don't like the idea of them wanting to do this to the general public though. We alread use the Biometric system to identify members who have lost thier ID or need to log on to a workstation.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Hmmm I agree with a previous poster that you're a wee bit paranoid, but hey what do we all come to slashdot for?
/. that you can post that article without getting modded 'offtopic', its called your journal and it can come in real handy for articles such as this. Click the link I gave you, put your article there and link it in your sig.
You know there is this great little place on
The Anti-Blog
Various Abraham Lincoln quotes:
"I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
-Lincoln's Inaugural Address
"I am not now, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social or political equality of the white and black races. I am not now nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarriages with white people. There is a physical difference between the white and the black races which will forever forbid the two races living together on social or political equality. There must be a position of superior and inferior, and I am in favor of assigning the superior position to the white man."
-Lincoln in his speech to Charleston, Illinois, 1858
He freed the slaves in the south so that when the northern troops got there, the black people there could be freed and enlisted to fight the Confederate states.
So how was this about slavery? It's a myth, that's how.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Links to the original NY Times article and Slashdot thread that discussed another initiative out of this agency. Declan McCullagh's was a follow-up as he mentioned in his piece.
The NY Times tells us that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the same agency that wants to create a massive cross-domain transaction database, also proposed what it called eDNA: '...tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible.' Slashdotter Declan McCullagh followed up on the NYT piece with his article on MSNBC.