[wordup] Perhaps "Total" was an unfortunate choice of words

[Adam Shand]

It's interesting that the basic argument here seems to roughly follow 
that of David Brin's book "The Transparent Society".  The argument being 
that privacy advocates are misguided.  No matter how much we complain, 
protest, etc "they" will always know more about us then we know about 
them, and that this asymmetry of knowledge is dangerous.  Brin's 
argument is that instead of trying to protect our privacy we should just 
get over the outdated concept of "privacy", as it will never exist in a 
highly technological society.  Instead we should work to make sure that 
privacy doesn't exist anywhere, that we can peer into the world of the 
powerful as easily as they can into ours.

While I understand and, to an extend, agree with the arguement, it still 
scares the crap out of me.

Adam.

Via: The Eristocracy <Eristocracy at merrymeet.com>

From: Matthew Brown <mbrown at iolon.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 10:22:43 -0800
Subject: Show Poindexter what Total Information Awareness is all about

[I've often wondered if this would work to get laws changed regarding
identity theft.  If enough congressmen had their identity information
published, perhaps they might side with consumers, rather than with the
credit industry. -MLB]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28432.html

Total Poindexter Awareness: essential information
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 05/12/2002 at 01:08 GMT

John Gilmore has picked up a call to give the government's snoopers and
window-peepers a taste of their own medicine. His suggestion is at the 
top of MIT's Blogdex today, so it looks like it's already gaining some 
traction.

To illustrate the potential loss of privacy SF Weekly columnist Matt 
Smith called Admiral John Poindexter at home, and helpfully provided us 
with his address and telephone number, in a piece published here. The 
disgraced Iran Contra felon - who was convicted of conspiracy, 
obstruction, and lying to Congress and escaped a custodial sentence on a 
technicality - has been given the job of creating the largest dragnet of 
personal information ever devised. DARPA will forage for details of 
every American's email, phone communications and financial transactions.

The extent of Total Information Awareness was disclosed by the New York
Times last month. When reporter John Markoff rang the Homeland Defense
department, they hadn't heard of the plan. That's because Poindexter's
"Information Awareness Office" - with the unfortunate choice of an
all-seeing eye in a pyramid as its logo - reports to the Department of
Defense.

"The database envisioned is of an unprecedented scale," the Information
Awareness Office itself notes in its description of TIA.

DARPA created the Internet, and recently tried to destroy it - as this
humdinger of a follow-up by Markoff explains.

Smith promised to "publish anything that readers can convincingly claim 
to have obtained legally".

Gilmore agrees:-

"Employees at various businesses and organizations such as airlines, 
credit card authorizers, rental-car agencies, shops, gyms, schools, 
tollbooths, garbage services, banks, taxis, honest civil servants and 
police officers, and restaurants could demonstrate denial of service to 
such targeted people.

"A simple "We won't serve YOUR KIND OF PEOPLE" would do, as was 
practiced on black people for many decades. More subtle forms of denial 
of service are possible, such as "You've been 'randomly' selected as a 
security risk, I'll have to insist that [some degrading thing happen to 
you]". Or merely, "I can't seem to get this credit card to work, sir, 
and those twenties certainly look counterfeit to me."

"People who associated closely with such a targeted individual, such as
their families, relatives, friends, neighbors, protective secret service
agents, and business associates, might find themselves swept up in the
information dragnet.

"Such a demonstration would graphically reveal the societal dangers of
deploying such systems on a wide scale against a large number of 
citizens -- preferably early enough that such a deployment could be 
prevented, rather than reversed after major harm was caused."

In Gilmore's view, that the real menace is that such a Panopticon works 
on the principle of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. False information 
could be used to harass innocent citizens.

But the Panopticon - a prison in which the observers are concealed - 
derives its power from the asymmetry of knowledge, as Foucalt described 
it. They know much more about you than you know about them.

Perhaps that's what DARPA means when it refers to "asymmetric" technology.®