US Govt to monitor every purchase made (1 Viewer)

[steve albino]

LOS ANGELES, Nov 22: A massive database that the government will use to monitor every purchase made by every American citizen is a necessary tool in the "war on terror", the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

Edward Aldridge, undersecretary of Acquisitions and Technology, said the Pentagon was developing a prototype database to seek "patterns indicative of terrorist activity".

Aldridge said the database would collect and use software to analyse consumer purchases in hopes of catching terrorists before it was too late.

Examples he cited were: sudden and large cash withdrawals, one- way air or rail travel, rental car transactions and purchases of firearms, chemicals or agents that could be used to produce biological or chemical weapons.

It would also combine consumer information with visa records, passports, arrest records or reports of suspicious activity given to law enforcement or intelligence services.

 

[pete]

In the film Minority Report, Tom Cruise heads a futuristic police team who have the technology to spot people who intend to commit serious crimes before the crime itself takes place.
The premise might seem far-fetched but it could be closer than we think.

In the Pentagon in Washington, a team is working on plans to collect as much information about every single aspect of everyone in America as they can.

This includes everything from doctor's records to bank deposits, e-mail to travel tickets, phone conversations to magazine subscriptions.

The reason, according to the Under Secretary of Defense Pete Aldridge, is to catch people intending to carry out terrorist crimes.

"The bottom line is that this is an important research project to determine the feasibility of using certain transactions and events to discover and respond to terrorists before they act."

Backers of the project, known as Total Information Awareness, admit that it sounds Orwellian.

A reluctant supporter of the Pentagon's plans is Frank Gaffney, a former assistant defence secretary.

He says that it would only take one more terrorist attack and public support is assured.

"At that point there will not only be a willingness to submit to those sorts of infringement but a demand that they be infringed upon in the hope of trying to protect us.

"If there were no war on terror, this is not something that we would want to do."

Not everyone though is convinced, particularly since the man heading the Pentagon team has a dubious past.

Total Information Awareness is the baby of Admiral John Poindexter. As an adviser to former President Reagan, he sold arms to Iran and using the money to fund the Nicaraguan contras.

Most opponents, though, focus on the wider question of what Admiral Poindexter is trying to achieve and how likely it is to fail.

Mark Rotenberg monitors government attempts at surveillance and snooping. He believes hi-tech solutions are often the ones with the highest rate of failure.

"This is a technology-intensive approach that assumes if you have enough data you can produce clear conclusions," he said.

"We went through a period of time recently in Washington with the sniper attacks when everyone was looking for a white truck.

"We could have had a computer database running profiles of every white truck owner in the country to try to decide which of them was the sniper. In fact, the answer was that none of them were."

The white van was found to be a false lead in the infamous Washington sniper case.

In the film Minority Report things go horribly wrong with the system.

Many in Washington are predicting that this real-life scheme, if it ever got off the ground, would lead to hi-tech chaos and failure.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2563249.stm

 

[pete]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/audio/38571000/rm/_38571681_pentagon09_webb.ram

 

[dubh in seattle]

Originally posted by steve albino
LOS ANGELES, Nov 22: A massive database that the government will use to monitor every purchase made by every American citizen is a necessary tool in the "war on terror",

I've got their "necessary tool" right here, the bastards.

 

[kstop]

Check out the logo!

http://www.darpa.mil/iao/

Conspiracy theorists' heads everywhere must be exploding at the mere sight of it!

 

[pete]

holy fucking shit

you could not make that up

I mean... they couldn't possibly not know what people will say? could they?

 

[snakybus]

arg

linky no worky

can you post a picture? I'm intrigued

 

[kstop]

Originally posted by snakybus
arg

linky no worky

can you post a picture? I'm intrigued

Checkit

 

[kstop]

Amusingly enough, they've removed the logo from the site. A graphic designer underling is probably being Illuminutted as we speak.

 

[silo]

that's ridiculous. crazy bad.

and their "mission statement" is completely impenetrable, too.

"The DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO) will imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making."

just so as you know.

 

[herv]

minority report is an apt comparison....

"Biometric signatures of humans"

"Event prediction and capability development model building engines"

"Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance"

"Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control"

 

[Ed]

To be honest i'm not sure why everyone gets so riled up by this stuff, the us government have been monitoring that stuff for years, it's just they now think that there's enough public support to justify telling folks about it. Of course it's a really stupid idea and won't reduce the threat of terrorism in any major way, it may catch the really thick ones, but to be fair the only thing it's gonna be useful for is catching the odd white-supremacist nutter group before they do something daft.

 

[fastfude]

And how long before the data is leeched / sold off to the ravenous hordes of marketing executives? such massive demographic tallying would be a wet dream to the megacorps who want to sell you your own mother.