Salon Premium: Is Big Brother our only hope against bin Laden?

The Total Imformation Awareness program is an example of data-mining. My last major market research project was data mining Fed Ex data to find out what actions they undertook affected their business. You could do this even when they weren't taking actions in a nationally coordinated way. One of the biggest dangers in the governent doing this is the false positives, unless you don't care what innocent people you find suspicious. My friend Bill is still involved in data management for Gart's Sporting Goods, but he is not concerned with individual shoppers but instead is integrating company merchandise data.

If you tend to use such modern conveniences as credit cards, supermarkets and online bookstores, chances are you've been helped -- or, depending on how you see it, hurt -- by data mining. Broadly speaking, the phrase means the process of looking at a heap of information and finding something you think you might want. It implies a "fuzziness" about your search, a hunt for patterns buried in the data that are not obvious. Credit card companies use a form of data mining to determine whether your purchases look "unusual" and may, therefore, be fraudulent. Amazon.com uses it to recommend books by looking at other books you've purchased. When you hand over your discount-club card at a grocery store checkout, you're actually letting the store keep data on your personal shopping habits; some chains are finding ways to mine that data.

You can see why more than a few pundits have compared TIA to the notion of "precrime" imagined in the Philip K. Dick short story (and Tom Cruise movie) "Minority Report." The comparison is not meant to be a compliment.

There are several technological and mathematical reasons why TIA can't become truly oracular. Its main limitation is that it could never really know everything. Indeed, how much it could conceivably know -- and how fast it could know it -- is at this point unclear; a database on a huge scale that's meant to be as dynamic as TIA has never been set up before, experts say, and nobody knows if it's even possible.

In the end, the debate over TIA, if it comes, may hang on this point: Are the rules good enough? For some people, no number of safeguards may be OK. Lee Tien, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, says that "I can't possibly say yes based on what I know now. I'd have to be convinced there would be a commitment to privacy from the get-go, and we just don't see that now. This administration is known for its secrecy. They are as bad as Nixon, maybe worse. We certainly cannot trust them with this system."

That's probably a valid fear. But so is the fear of terrorism.

This is another example where some of the actions of the administration may be reasonable but the processes and the people in charge of it are not.