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Pentagon Soft-Pedals Total Information Awareness
PizzaFace writes "Congress was concerned that the Pentagon's 'Total Information Awareness' program would invade citizens' privacy, so it gave the program the red light until the Pentagon addressed Congress's privacy concerns. DARPA, the Pentagon technology agency that brought us the Internet in more innocent times, showed its Total Marketing Awareness by renaming the TIA program, 'Terrorism Information Awareness.' The gist of its report seems to be that data may be collected from everyone, but it will only be used against evildoers. You can read DARPA's report and a background story from the Washington Post."
What more innocent times were these, exactly?
An editorial in today's NY Times notes that one of the ways the TIA will track people is by their walk. Observantly, Dowd parallels this to Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks. Apparently, this method of detection can be overridden by wearing a long coat.
I feel safer already.
"it's the State who will define who an "evildoer""
No need. The State can define a new term 'Potnetial Terrorist' and we'd all be included - in effect it becomes Total Info Awareness. Sometime back I posted a series of definitions that could be used:
Potential Terrorist - All of us.
Kinetic terrorist - Mobile phone users.
Intellectual terrorists - Reverse-engineers
Organised potential terrorists - Linux User Groups
e-terrorists - internet users
and so on... No need to be bashful before ordering surveillance on all and sundry.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Yeah, what kind of country would store masses of weapons and threaten foreign nations with violence while imposing a police-state style military control on its own citizens?
Lucky we're nothing like those bastard Iraqis.
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"A witch! A witch! We've found a witch!"
"We have found a witch. May we burn her?"
"Burn her! Buuuuuurn her!"
"How do you know she is a witch?"
"She looks like one!"