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Bruce Sterling On Total Information Awareness
securitas writes "Declan McCullagh interviews Bruce Sterling about Total Information Awareness (renamed Terrorist Information Awareness and raising concerns) or 'Poindexter's nutty scheme' as Sterling thinks of it. He predicts TIA will destabilize the government and lead to internal KGB-style coups. Whether you agree with him or not it makes for thought-provoking reading."
Gathering information on people before they have done anything wrong is always a problem, especially if these people know that it is being collected. It makes poisioning the data pool attractive, even if it's only something as stupid as magazine subscriptions, email account names, aliases (which are legal as long as they're not used to deceive for nefarious purposes), and credit transactions.
The government is most likely to be able to track transactions that occur digitally, or require storage of information on computers that are not under the control of the individual whose data is being collected. Do you think that it's likely that terrorists will use these means, now that it's been announced that the government is collecting it? I'd think that they're more likely to buy guns from someone who has switched from running drugs into the country to running guns, to contact their fellow agents through 'chance' encounters, and to transact whatever seemingly legitimate business they use either with cash or through legitimate electronic transactions, which will make them blend into the electronic noise just like everyone else. How is this going to help matters?
The government already knows when one buys a new handgun through legitimate channels, through the Brady Law. They already should know about most of those who have explosives experience, since that is usually military training based to begin with, and demolitions companies, mining companies, and anyone else legitimately using explosives has to get their employees licensed. "Cyberterrorism" is an absolute joke of a term as long as easily broken-into OSes like anything Microsoft has ever put out is still in the mainstream and is still being used as a server, and there are probably dozens, if not hundreds of other examples like these.
I don't see how collecting all of this data is going to help.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It shows that they THINK we're gullable morons.
Just by renaming it to sound anti-terrorist, are we supposed to shut up and stop questioning it?
Instead of making our government BIGGER & MORE INTRUSIVE & STRIPPING AWAY OUR RIGHTS, why don't we investigate how 9/11 was allowed to happen when we had ALL THE INFO REQUIRED to prevent it?!?!?
Oh, I forgot--the investigation into that was quietly squashed without much media attention but we got color-coded alerts to make us feel that something "real" appropriate is being done.
"Hey, lets rename this unpopular law/project/war/etc. so people think it has to do with anti-terrorism, they'll shut up for sure especially if the media makes anyone speaking against it appear stupid, weak, liberal, unpatriotic, etc. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a bunch of unpopular shit done what would've caused riots/impeachments just a few year ago! Best of all, when people start to ask questions about the Pres or VP dealings with Enron or Halliburton again, we can just change the terror alert color so the media can refocus on that without resorting another murder case in California."
"And just in case we don't have any more terrorism in the USA, lets go piss off the Palestinians and make the Middle-eastern countries think we're gonna invade them--that'll stir up enough shit to make at least another group of crazies blow something up here--and we can milk that bombing to our advantage just like 9/11! We'll be silencing our critics and getting unpopular initiatives done for the next 50 years using this strategy!"
I'm obviously exaggerating to make a point but really, don't you think there's a grain of truth to associating unpopular initiatives with anti-terrorism just to get people to stop questioning it?