ACXIOM & “TIA”: MATCH MADE IN HELL

By now, reg­u­lar Defense Tech read­ers are famil­iar with Acxiom, the data aggre­ga­tion com­pany that’s sup­ply­ing your per­sonal infor­ma­tion to gov­ern­ment data-​​mining efforts like CAPPS II. Today, it came to light that the com­pany was being con­sid­ered as a sup­plier for Total Information Awareness, Darpa’s uber-​​database project.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center has obtained inter­nal Darpa e-​​mail about using Acxiom in TIA exper­i­ments. According to one mes­sage, Jennifer Barrett, Acxiom’s Chief Privacy Officer, gave Darpa advice on how to keep objec­tions to TIA to a min­i­mum.

“One of the key sug­ges­tions she made is that peo­ple will object to Big Brother, wide-​​coverage data­bases, but they don’t object to use of rel­e­vant data for spe­cific pur­poses that we can all agree on. Rather than get­ting all the data for any pur­pose, we should start with the goal, track­ing ter­ror­ists to avoid attacks, and then iden­tify the data needed (although we can’t define all of this, we can say that our tem­plates and mod­els of ter­ror­ists are good places to start),” wrote Darpa’s Lt. Col. Doug Dyer. “Already, this guid­ance has shaped my thinking.”

February 11th, 2004 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.