David Reed has an important, brief piece on the way in which the government’s Total Information Awareness program is similar to the ESP research done in the 50s and 60s.

… the so-called scientists (including Adm. Poindexter) who are leading this are about as clueless as the ESP researchers were, as to their biases, etc. Clever computer science, even powerful and correct computer science, will serve the same role in this process that the powerful statistical methods served in the Dr. Rhine’s ESP research enterprise. The math was not wrong… but it helped create a delusion.

The result in the TIA case will be very dangerous pseudo-scientific bullshit, I suspect. Unfortunately it will be turned on us.

As David points out, the civil libertarians among us (and why aren’t we all civil libertarians?) who are raising alarms about privacy in the land of the TIA “tend to reinforce the belief that there is any real investigatory information that can be extracted by inference from a very noisy and randomly selected pile of information.” In short, TIA needs to be debunked as well as denounced.

Categories: Uncategorized dw