Posted 2/05/2006 06:51:00 PM by Douglas

Interesting article about a fascinating book. Fascinating? I mean terrifying.

Picture "Minority Report" combined with Orwell's "1984" and Francis Ford Coppola's "Conversation": in an effort to prevent future crimes and predict what certain individuals are likely to do, the government has begun working with high-tech titans to keep tabs on the populace.

[...]

Privacy and civil liberties advocates have put the brakes on some government projects, like the Total Information Awareness initiative promoted by John Poindexter, the former vice admiral (of Iran-contra notoriety), and a surveillance engine known (half jokingly) as the Matrix (for the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) that would combine criminal and commercial records in one blindingly fast system. Yet Mr. O'Harrow points out: "The drive for more monitoring, data collection, and analysis is relentless and entrepreneurial. Where one effort ends, another begins, often with the same technology and aims. Total Information Awareness may be gone, but it's not forgotten. Other kinds of Matrix systems are already in the works."

Yikes! This isn't tin-foil hat time, this is real. It's going on right now, and hardly anyone knows or cares.