RENAMING the Orwellian-sounding Total Information Awareness project hasn’t won the Bush administration any more friends. Critics say the Terrorism Information Awareness programme still allows the US government an unprecedented window on every citizen’s life – and risks causing miscarriages of justice.
Last week, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency defended the programme in a report to Congress, after intense criticism from privacy advocates led to the name change. The $53 million project aims to develop technology that “mines” intelligence files and publicly available data for suspicious patterns in credit card bills, phone records, airline reservations, online news reports and other sources. The plan is to develop…
