From the CMS (Via ABC):
The U.S. government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity…
…The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement, or ADVISE. Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security, part of its three-year-old Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment, or TVTA, portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year….
…What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information — from financial records to CNN news stories — and cross-reference it against U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as “entities” — linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va.
The storage requirements alone are huge — enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. …
..For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst’s review.
…ADVISE “looks very much like TIA,” Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. “There’s the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis.”
My take on TIA and all this is both in the book, and here.
It is ironic that birth of THE INTERNET itself resulted from similar concerns – these is a classic example of Social Darwinism….what is so fascinating is to ponder 30 years from now how this Technology will evolve to the consumer mainstream, like The Internet did.
How different will information technology and science be as a result of what is being launched now in its embryonic stage.
The costs of living in an open society, means that technology will constantly have to advance to keep up the the technology of the foes – and the public may just have to get accustomed to a different threshhold redifining What “Privacy” Means in the 21st Century.
To me this seems just like the next evolution of ECHELON. And I’m amazed that no one has made the connection between surveillance and an end of network neutrality. I’m not a packet gear head, but I would guess that the ability to track/analyze/store/search IP traffic depends, or at least becomes scalable, on whether that traffic is differentiated in the first place.