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Inside Total Information Awareness: Groove and XML
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Monday, December 23 @ 14:23:50 EST Civil Liberties
The New York Times has an article about TIA in a by-now-familiar vein: the data is out there already, thanks to our habits of handing over identifying informaiton at the drop of a hat. But near the middle of the article, three remarkable new facts about the TIA effort emerge:

First, the "early version" of TIA is powered by Groove, Ray Ozzie's peer-to-peer platform for businesses. The link between sharing information among users and combining databases seems tenuous, but it's still startling to see a peer-to-peer system deployed to enable surveillance, rather than to evade it.

Second, the full-scale TIA systems are going to be based on XML. This is less surprising -- after all, XML has been pitched as a technology for bridging mutually-incompatible databases. The implication would appear to be that TIA will involve mining existing databases rather than the creation of a single super-mega-hyper database. Once again, the distance between commercial invasions of privacy to governmental ones is remarkably small.

And third, the usual unnamed sources have been saying that Admiral Poindexter himself suggested outside non-governmental oversight. He's refusing comment now, and the official spokescritters are denying that any such plans are on the table, but this revelation does indicate that TIA's benefactors are quite aware of its potential for abuse. That such a reasonable idea as outside oversight is no longer up for discussion is just another sad sign of the hubris that is TIA.

 
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