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Total Information Awareness, For One
Jason writes "This guy has created his own TIA program for his electronic transactions around DC. He writes, 'Conceptually, I decided to create a personal TIA program to track my own electronic movements... and to document every single electronically-recorded transaction I've made.' A small vignette into what could be done with your electronic droppings."
Why does this surprise him? It need not take that much work to figure out that writing checks or using the "card" can get you mapped out, especially if the govt. has the warrant to track you (and with the patriot act, it shouldn't be too hard). Redundant to say the least.
A blog like any other.
So, while this is interesting, from an illustrative standpoint (how much info can be retrieved from receipts and such), the site seems superficial and a little voyeuristic. I was hoping for some insight into the problem such as how to fight TIA, or from a CS perspective, even how to deal with disparate data from medical records to dinner transactions.
:-)
However, this site should illustrate to us that one should realize that because of TIA, once these databases are created, they never really go away. They will be mined eventually by corporations looking to expand market share by tracking individuals shopping or lifestyle decisions. In fact, there is already precedence for this in recent history. And they will be used for alternative governmental purposes other than that originally intended. There is again precedence for this as well already.
Finally, perhaps its the medical training but every time I see TIA, I think of transient ischemic attack which conceptually I suppose, total information awareness could induce in some folks.
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I too have been working on this sort of thing out of interest, but to a much larger degree. Since all my emails, chat logs, financial transactions, contact details, photos, etc. are digital and I have a record of them, I am able to place keys between them and come up with all sorts of useless info (which I will not share :P). Such things as:
Can look at a photo, then see how much money I spent on that date, where I spent it and what I said about it to my friends online using regexps.
Can map out (like this article) my location at any one time, with photos if it was since July 2003 (when I got my digital camera)
Can at-a-glance see all communication with any one person, and who that person knows through CC'd emails, group chats, etc.
Can get a calendar style day by day breakdown of time spent online, amount spent and where, amount I spoke to people online that day, etc.
The system is pretty cool but needs a bit more work before I am happy with it, and it is probably going to be just for me since it is a mess of SQL, shell scripts, perl and java.
Needless to say, the amount of data and stuff I can do with it is very scary. I cannot factor in recorded phone calls, precise supermarket purchases, etc. TIA and it's inevitable bigger brother (think patriot act then patriot act2) could store a lot more of my life than I would ever want to give out.
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Not really because he also saved his receipts and scanned those in. So it was slightly more work. It's also interesting to try this on yourself, not from a GIS perspective but to try and account for where you spend money or how often.
I tried to manage my money by tracking where I spent money and over the course of a month I'd racked up around 50 different vendors. After six months (had I kept it up) I could probably go to the Brickskeller (like this guy did) and open a corporate account with a 10% discount based on volume.
It may not be TIA but it was more work than your passing glance gathered.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I don't think I've seen this mentioned before so here goes...
As an act of civil disobedience, as a group flood TIA, Carnivore, etc with false information. Start referring to your online contacts as "terrorists", make references to "picking up the fertilizer and diesel", instant message each other with false meeting points you never actually go to, and generally throw a wrench into the cogs of the machine by making the signal-to-noise ratio more noise than signal.
Some may call this unpatriotic, others may see it as patriotic, it's a personal judgement call as I see it.
I pay cash for pretty much everything now, but that's just because I don;t have a credit card yet (i'm too lazy). I'm wondering exactly what else the Total Information Awareness thing will be collecting; if I take out a big chunk of money from a ATM every week (like I do now) and pay in cash for everything that week, how much can they learn? i'm afraid of being a suspected terrorist now; I "hide my tracks" from the government, read slashdot, and am learning chemistry "to make bombs". That, and I've started encrypting some stuff I send
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
I think you missed the point. OF COURSE, big government would be able to create more detailed maps and logs of our activities. The question is: would you want them to be able to do even the little he showed us? Take that map and add a few thousand more data points, add in the locations and times of all your cellular phone calls and see just how private you feel. And further suppose that some spook analyst (or government supercomputer) somewhere takes a personal interest in you (for whatever reason) and requests that a GPS device be attached to your car. Now that map shows everywhere you went, and with all the financial data they'll pretty much know what you did. I dunno ... that map looks kinda scary to me.
Makes me wonder when the Feds will mandate GPS tracking devices be installed on all cars. Needn't even be a remotely-addressable real-time device either. Just a simple, cheap receiver with enough memory to log the last couple of weeks of your travels. A cop, agent, whatever just walks up to your car with a hand-held reader and downloads the data.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
All data is suspect, but data that is kept secret is most suspect.
By mandating total transparency of data, the community can actually act to verify and "clean" it. Think of reputation management systems. Think of journalists: professional reputation managers, to some extent.
It would change the world we live in, but the only alternative I see is more of what we have today, namely data as a weapon of oppression and exploitation for those with sufficient money and power.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Bush's essay is really fascinating to read: he envisions a magical desk that could record all a person's thoughts & encounters, and provide the ability to browse that library through a special screen on the device. Keep in mind that this was in 1945, right at the beginning of the computer era, when these machines were the size of buildings, far more complicated to operate, and nowhere near powerful enough. Now, half a century later, Bell feels that the technology is finally at the point where Bush's ideas can be implemented. Think what you will of Microsoft, or of the "big brother" implications of such a machine -- the very fact that this sort of thing is being put into practice is quite impressive.
Anyone working on such omnipresent recording & retrieval systems needs to be aware of this prior art.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
When I first looked at this, I thought (as a lot of people here have commented) that this wasn't much of a big deal: so what? This guy scanned in a few receipts and plotted them on a map, big deal...
However, as I started to look more closely at his patterns, I thought to myself: wow! Based on just this tiny swatch of information, I already know the aproximate area where he lives. If I wanted, I could find the average household income in his neighborhood. I know what he eats and I can tell if he's going to have a party next week based on what he got at the grocery store.
I know what date and time he went to the market, so if I had a few more data points, I could probably predict when he's going to be there.
He got a map of Central America at Borders, perhaps a statistical model shows that people following his patterns are likely to be terrorists who want to commit atacks in Central America? Or perhaps we can market cheap airline tickets to him?
While this may just look like a guys random map, you can piece together a whole lot from this.