I think the patriot act was one of the good pieces of legislation along with “Check 21” born out of the September 11th attacks, which has herded the masses in the right or wrong directions.
The NSA has had the capability to read E-mails, monitor all means of voice and electronic communications via project Echelon, the ear in the sky. The way we have skirted around the law on this was to monitor the comms. overseas on British soil, with joint cooperation of the Brits.
The real benefits of the Patriot Act are achieved by the ability to bring this capability back home and capitalize on it by routing your right to privacy, along with info/data (information sharing) through a new dynamic automated system, called Total Information Awareness (TIA) now renamed Terrorist Information Awareness for paranoids who fear the New World Order. I like to call it the Oracle or Prophet, because it will have the ability to predict to a large degree the accuracy future events before they happen.
How you say, the goal is simple the means is complex.
The Oracle is an advanced project of revolutionary technology pioneered by (DARPA) Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, headed by John Poindexter.
The aim is to track through a single thread, an event or person from birth to death, as much information as possible, such as financial records, medical records, communications, travel and all new sources of information as they are developed, using Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA). This will allow access to fuse government, private, public and commercial databases. The data will be stored in ultra-large all-source information repositories or grand database.
The purpose of collecting, storing and refreshing of this data is to discover patterns and associations thru data mining and continue to develop data mining, discovery and search tools. It will use algorithms and human analysis. Unified Modeling Language (UML) will visually tie all levels of the system together generating insight from architectural patters and facilitating drill-down to understand underlying rationale to detect potential activity.
An individuals will be tracked by the Human ID at a Distance program (HID) possibly via information signature or electronic web DNA (eDNA) and by such other methods as biometric technology, face recognition or gait recognition, it will essentially be a nationwide identification system that would not require your knowledge of participation. It will track persons across multiple information sources or possibly control points.
The entire population of the U.S. and potentially the world, since itÂ’s use has been approved for use outside the United States, would be subjected to TIA surveillance.
This raises some concerns for abuse most notably by scientists of the US Association for Computing Machinery (USACM).
They site that it is likely to be misused to the detriment of many innocent American citizens, by individuals who have a personal or political vendetta or have been compromised by blackmail or greed could do great harm.
The attack in the NAACP for political speech by the IRS could be an example of a political vendetta.
This Crown Jewel has a great potential for the social sciences; it could recognize areas of wasted or redundant human activity. It has even greater applications to world commerce, because it has a separate business model that it can run in. With the insight generated it can give corporations or individual insiders, a huge advantage over competition, allowing insiders to monopolize entire industries and drive out other competitors.
In other words it could make someone people extremely wealthy.
The bottom line is can you trust man with this much knowledge and power. This is the real issue of our time everything else is just a WMD (weapon of mass distraction). I'ts putting allot of faith in who inherits this power. I think this is the real prize for the winner of the election, 4 years of TIA.
:cof:
