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Nix the Pentagon's new spy project

Date published: 1/26/2003

AN FRANCISCO--It sounds like science fiction. But this time it isn't George Orwell's Big Brother or Tom Cruise in "Minority Report"--it's Total Information Awareness, the Pentagon's blueprint for the total surveillance society.

When it comes to privacy, people have long argued about who's worse--the government or corporations. TIA moots the question. The whiz kids at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the Pentagon's technology lab) are building an unholy alliance between government and big business to snuff out your privacy.

In a computerized society, we always leave electronic tracks: financial, housing, education, travel, medical, veterinary, transportation, communication, and so on. Use a credit card or a driver's license? The government wants to know what you do with them. Buy a gun? Visit a doctor? Have any drug prescriptions? Keep money in a bank? Make phone calls? Use the Internet? Big Brother wants to know about that, too.

And it might not even need to suck all that data into one big computer. The Pentagon wants to mine all that data where it sits, in thousands of private computers across the country.

Of course, the Pentagon is also a big fan of surveillance technology. The familiar video camera will see us in a new light. Today's clumsy face-recognition software misfires when people wear hats or sunglasses. The new Human ID at a Distance program is working on computer technologies to identify us by the color of our skin, the size and shape of our bodies, the way we walk, even the way we smile or frown. We won't need humans to watch video screens or hours of boring videotape. Computers will do the watching to figure out who was where and who is "suspicious."

The same goes for what we say or write. The Pentagon wants computers to understand language. We won't need human beings to eavesdrop, wiretap, search e-mail, or know what we read. No more agents in white vans: Computers can do it for us faster and cheaper.

Think of it as equal-opportunity surveillance. It doesn't matter whether you've done anything wrong. TIA assumes that everything we do must be looked at. After all, anything could be suspicious if they stare at it hard enough.

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Date published: 1/26/2003