Two recent editorials, one in Scientific American (March 2003) and another in Harper’s Magazine (February 2003), have pointed out both the scientific and political folly of the administration’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, headed by John Poindexter (of Iran-Contra infamy).
The TIA is a program to do data-mining of vastly disparate information databases – from purchasing patterns to e-mail usage to prescription purchases – to discover patterns that will help identify terrorist activities before they occur. The Patriot Act and other law made since September 11 gives the government sweeping access to such data and requires the producers and holders of the information to make it available.
The editors at Scientific American point out that data mining, to scientists, is something of a dirty word. It connotes blind search through data, an effort that tends to confuse real patterns with mere coincidences. Any large data set contains patterns, and most of those found will falsely accuse Americans of terrorist activity – a vanishingly rare real activity. They estimate that for every for ever 10 terrorists identified, 2.8 million innocent people will be accused. Finally, they remark that if total information awareness is impossibly in the observable physical world, how can it be expected in the world of human activities?
Lewis H. Lapham, in Harper’s, comments on the willingness of the American people to give up on their civil liberties in this time of fear and uncertainty. He calls the Total Information Awareness program a search for a FutureMap that hopes to predict terrorist events with high confidence from the electronically available data on an individual’s everyday activities. He bemoans the fact that there is little outcry in the halls of Congress, the media, or among the populace about the violation of fundamental rights guaranteed by our constitution.
Our government, and our American culture, seems intent on pursuing these quixotic goals, spending enormous amounts of money, employee multitudes of analysts and spies, and promoting their infallibility and rightness constantly. Missile defense comes to mind as another similar type of pursuit.
The zealous pursuit of these objectives is damaging to our national image, culture, and life. My only solace is that none of these are possible to achieve, as anyone who knows anything about information theory, quantum mechanics, and uncertainty. Thank heavens that we will never see what the world would be life if they were possible to achieve.
