Folks are getting mighty worked up about the Information Awareness System being proposed over at DARPA, saying it’s the worst Big Brother project to get medieval on the collective ass of our civil liberties since McCarthy.
I see it differently. It’s actually a huge opportunity to protect civil liberties — and provide a potentially valuable anti-terrorism tool.
First, the obvious concessions. Yes, appointing John Poindexter to lead the thing was a fairly boneheaded move. (You could say that “mistakes were made.”) And yes, the Illuminati logo is downright creepy (although not yet quite as creepy as the posters our friends in Britain are dealing with).
But let’s all calm down just a bit. DARPA does long-range research; they’re the folks who invented the Internet, yada yada yada. When I read the project description on the actual DARPA website, here’s what I see:
The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists
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