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Peter Fitton, IneffectiveI voted "ineffective." I expect it to be a lot of money spent with little to show for it.
This is not like screening credit card transactions for fraud, or predicting which cellular customers will churn. There are too few needles (terrorists) in too large a haystack (the population of residents of and visitors to the US) to get anything valuable using current hardware and data mining techniques. Furthermore, the data integration effort that forms the foundation of the project will turn out to be much more difficult than now envisaged.
Chris Clifton, CAN be ...
The key word here is CAN be - I am confident it is possible develop
technology such that TIA will not significantly erode privacy, and will
be at least somewhat effective (a substantial improvement over today's
systems.) WILL be is another issue - I don't know enough about what is
being done to have confidence that the program will meet its (very
ambitious) goals.
Alessandro ZANASI, Effective, and no risk.
I answered: Effective, and preserve privacy. The TIA enabling
technologies are already taught at universities, in use in the business
sector (e.g.: email analysis, feelings extraction and competitive
intelligence through text mining...) and in national security field
(with some applications more advanced than the commercial ones). These
experiences were considered so effective that TIA has been proposed. I
personally don't see more risks for the common citizen privacy than
before TIA implementation.
Will Dwinnell, Effectiveness and Privacy
I voted for "Effective and erode privacy, but worth it", but...
Alot will depend on the details of course, but I believe that a large
technical information effort could be at least moderately efective at
preventing or deterring terrorism.
Depending on the "privacy" being given up, it might or might not be worth it.
Josh Froelich, Remember the Carnivore
I just wanted to reference the governments earlier use of the
carnivore program, where isps were asked to install email monitoring
like software so the fed could network search parts of email content
in logs for keywords like "terrorism". I remember watching how a
congressional committee reacted to the privacy implications. It was
not positive. There is definitely the issue of technical literacy, as
was apparent from how hard it was for the committee to understand the
fine line between aggregate profiling and intruding on a single
individual's private life. This communications barrier shows that even
if it could be effective, it seems most non-technical people would be
unable to understand its implications and assume the worst.
Editor, TIA and Data Mining: Effective, Preserve Privacy? DARPA recently released to Congress its report on Terrorism (formerly "Total") Information Awareness program (TIA). DARPA says TIA is now a research program but when deployed, it can be effective - find likely terrorists while keeping false positives to a manageable number. Critics say it will be ineffective and will erode privacy. What do you think?