Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
An angry public response forced the Pentagon to publicly back away from its Total Information Awareness surveillance program. Now it's back, with one major revision: a name change. Instead of "Total Information Awareness," they're calling it "Terrorism Information Awareness." According to Washington Post correspondent Ariana Eunjung Cha, the proposed system "would have the power to track people as never before. It would identify people at great distances by the irises of their eyes, the grooves in their face or even their gait. It would look for suspicious patterns in video footage of people's movements. And it would analyze airline ticket purchases, visa applications, as well as financial, medical, educational and biometric records to try to predict terrorists' acts or catch them in the planning stage." Another TIA proposal, the "Misinformation Detection" system, will analyze language and other aspects of text for false or misleading information. (It won't have far to look.)
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