Declan McCullagh asks Bruce Sterling about Total Information Awareness.
I’ll tell you what will happen if it were an effective TIA. There would immediately be a series of coups inside the Republican Party as the people who owned the KGB survival mechanism were systemically outed and “Trent Lotted”…It would be profoundly destabilizing. Their sexual affairs would be public. They’d be “Lewinskied.” They’d be “Whitewatered.”
I’ve been thinking about TIA since annotating content and the semantic web were hot topics at OSCOM Cambridge. As much as people fear TIA, we want it for ourselves. I’d love a software tool which consumes my email and web trail, then whispers to me, and only me, all the insights and connections it found.
But if we have Personal TIA, then the government will have TIA. No amount of legislating will stop it. Not because folks like Pondexter are bad, but because if there’s a TIA tool, and it’s not used, and there’s another major attack on the US, then the polity will howl and scream: Why didn’t you spy on our conversations, and look through our underwear drawers! But I doubt you’ll stop an Islamic Fascist by looking through Mary Jo Plotnick’s Yahoo Chat logs.
