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The Total
Information Awareness (TIA) program is run by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), a branch of the Department
of Defense
that works
on military
research.
TIA's goal is to
collect as much information as possible about as many
people as possible
into
an "ultra-large-scale" database. TIA might incorporate government
records of all kinds, individual medical and financial records,
political beliefs, travel history, prescriptions,
buying habits, communications (phone calls, e-mails and Web surfing),
school records, personal and family associations, and more. The government
will then use data mining techniques to try to identify terrorists
and terrorist
activities.
TIA is an enormous threat to our privacy, our Constitution, and
our freedom. The keepers of
the TIA database would gain a tremendous amount of power over American
citizens. Inevitably, some of them will abuse that power. TIA flies
in the face of the American tradition that the police conduct surveillance
only where there is
evidence of involvement in wrongdoing. The TIA needs to be stopped.
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