NEW TECHNOLOGIES like DIVAs (Distributed Digital Video Arrays) and experimental projects like LifeLog make it technically feasible to observe everybody living in the US pervasively and persistently. TIA, the Total Information Awareness program (recently renamed the Terrorist Information Awareness program), shows how using these systems "to keep us safe" could combine with these technologies to create a climate of active surveillance. Without strong laws in place to keep these types of systems in check, the cure for terrorism is likely to irrevocably harm our society.

DIVAs

DIVAs were first used to analyze traffic patterns as well as to find out locations of accidents on the road, and send out help. In the last year, research into DIVAs (funded by a variety of sources including the Department of Defense) has moved into the area of tracking movement of humans.

DIVAs were used at the Super Bowl last year in San Diego (see some interesting links below scroll to about page 9 of the power point slides). Through the use of special cameras, a person’s movements can be tracked over a distance each camera relaying information to the next camera. DIVAs proponents theorize that specific individuals could be identified by face recognition software, as well as software that analyzes the way a person walks. DIVAs can also be used to monitor places 24 four hours a day by camera only.

Many of the technical papers and other research materials associated with the project point out that the information collected by DIVAs could be stored in a database and kept for additional purposes.

LifeLog

LifeLog is a kind of a digital diary, sponsored by U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The DARPA website states that “…the LifeLog capability would provide an electronic diary to help the individual more accurately recall and use his or her past experiences to be more effective in current or future tasks.” The description goes on to say “…this entails collecting diverse data, understanding how to describe the data, learning which data and what relationships among them are important, and extracting useful information. … The goal of the data collection is to “see what I see,” rather than to “see me”. Users are in complete control of their own data collection efforts, decide when to turn the sensors on or off, and decide who will share the data.” Kind of like the ultimate peeping tom.

Think of LifeLog as a modern day “Brainstorm” Natalie Wood’s last firm in the early 1980’s. The plot in Brainstorm revolved around a helmet-like device that records all of the experiences that the wearer has including what the person was thinking, feeling, and seeing. The experiences were then placed on tapes for others to play back for their own not always honorable purposes.

Terrorist Information Awareness Program (TIA)

TIA, another DARPA product, was originally known as the Total Information Awareness, and envisions a world where "data fusion" techniques have the potential to take advantage of whatever data is available about a person to track all their movements and activities.

TIA's approach is to pull various sources of information, and combine them to give a clearer picture of a person or people. Why not just take all the data from the DIVAs showing most foot and vehicular traffic and combine it with the financial and transactional data that TIA already plans to mine? And the depth of data in the LifeLog could give a fairly complete picture of an individual's life.

Even though TIA might never find a terrorist, the end result would still be the evisceration of our rights to free speech, privacy, and due process (a constitutional protection we have to contest any charges brought against us).

For some reason, the specter of "total information" made people nervous, and so the project was recently renamed the Terrorist Information Awareness. I feel so much better. I know you do too.

Legal Protections?

Many people are surprised to find out that the U.S. doesn’t have many privacy laws to protect against these types of data collection and usage. The Privacy Act of 1974 (the statute that we use to find out what files the government is keeping on us) is hopelessly out of date. There have been so many exceptions to the Act that for it is almost useless. For an example, there are exceptions that allow government to collect and use data for law enforcement and intelligence purposes. These types of exceptions are often interpreted very broadly.

Additionally, there is no regulation on the collection of personal information collected by corporations and then sold to the government. The Privacy Act only applies to government this is another gaping hole in protections for our privacy.

It may be time to consider dumping the Privacy Act and start over with a law that better protects our privacy in this age of ubiquitous data collection and usage.

The whittling away of our privacy and other civil rights is a lot like the frog in the pot of water story: if you put the frog in boiling water, he jumps out immediately and thus saves his life. But if you put him in water and heat it up gradually, he never jumps out and is then killed. While we’re getting used to the concept of TIA, uses for LifeLog and DIVAs are being contemplated. We shouldn’t wait until it’s too late to put in oversight protections, or better yet, eliminate, these programs.