BRIDE OF “TIA” LIVES

Congress may have dri­ven a stake through Total Information Awareness. But there are lots of other gov­ern­ment data-​​mining pro­grams — eeriely sim­i­lar to TIA — that are still very much alive.
One TIA-​​like project is Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD), an ini­tia­tive of the little-​​known Intelligence Community Advanced Research and Development Activity, notes secrecy guru Steven Aftergood, with the Federation of American Scientists.
“Pursued with a min­i­mal pub­lic pro­file and lack­ing a polar­iz­ing fig­ure like Adm. Poindexter to gal­va­nize oppo­si­tion, NIMD has pro­ceeded qui­etly even as TIA imploded,” Aftergood writes.
The NIMD effort aims to comb through “struc­tured text in var­i­ous for­mats, unstruc­tured text, spo­ken text, audio, video, tables, graphs, dia­grams, images, maps, equa­tions, chem­i­cal for­mu­las, etc.” to help “intel­li­gence ana­lysts to spot the tell­tale signs of strate­gic sur­prise.“
By now, we all know what that means.

September 26th, 2003 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.