The Pentagon is busy assuing folks that the Total Information Awareness program — wherein big government computers link to everyone else’s databases about you and collate it into a dossier of activities that is just as accurate as your credit record and your alumni association bio — isn’t really a threat to Americans — at least not real ones.
If deployed, the system would be set up in a way that would prevent investigators from indiscriminately rummaging through personal records, the report said.
“Safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of Americans is a bedrock principle,” the report said.
While specific safeguards have not been established, possibilities mentioned by the report included audit trails to keep track of who is using the system, access controls to limit what data they see and filters to hide individuals’ names unless investigators had a court warrant to reveal them.
Riiiight. Because we all know how well those sorts of access controls work at the IRS and police and private industry.
Once the data is there, it will be abused. We can try to restrict that, we can try to control that, we can try to punish it, but pretending that it won’t happen is disingenuous.
It’s that disingenousity that worries me more about the TIA proposal than its fundamental nature. I’m not too much of a privacy nut, and I assume that there is data collection and correlation already going on that we don’t know about, and it doesn’t bother me — too much. But I get my hackles up when I sense someone’s trying to sell me something …
… and part of selling is packaging, which may be the Pentagon is renaming TIA to mean, instead, “Terrorist Information Awareness.” If it only held information on terrorists, I think folks would feel a bit less concerned.
(via BoingBoing)