Okay, here’s the good news: it’s a rough job market out there, but there are openings, if you make the right proposal. Just be quick. Go to www.darpa.mil/ipto/Solicitations/PIP_03-30.html where the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting proposals for a new “concept” called “LifeLog.” (I have to suggest parenthetically that they might consider including among their first LifeLog monitorees a writer-volunteer or two, who could not only provide total information about their personal lives, habits, feelings, experiences, and ventures, on and off-line, but also pick up a tad of extra dough polishing up the language of DARPA’s proposals. I’m understandably hesitant to criticize a government so intent on knowing everything I do, think, or feel, but I think and feel that DARPA’s writing style lacks a certain je ne sais quoi — whoops, French,! There’s a monitorable mistake) Anyway, when you make your proposal, include that writer idea, it just might be a winner.
To get you started, let me quote a couple of boulder-filled paragraphs from the DARPA document. According to its instructions, you are to:
“develop an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities. The objective of this “LifeLog” concept is to be able to trace the “threads” of an individual’s life in terms of events, states, and relationships.
“LifeLog is interested in three major data categories: physical data, transactional data, and context or media data. “Anywhere/anytime” capture of physical data might be provided by hardware worn by the LifeLog user. Visual, aural, and possibly even haptic sensors capture what the user sees, hears, and feels. GPS, digital compass, and inertial sensors capture the user’s orientation and movements. Biomedical sensors capture the user’s physical state. LifeLog also captures the user’s computer-based interactions and transactions throughout the day from email, calendar, instant messaging, web-based transactions, as well as other common computer applications, and stores the data (or, in some cases, pointers to the data) in appropriate formats. Voice transactions can be captured through recording of telephone calls and voice mail, with the called and calling numbers as metadata. FAX and hardcopy written material (such as postal mail) can be scanned. Finally, LifeLog also captures (or at least captures pointers to) the tremendous amounts of context data the user is exposed to every day from diverse media sources, including broadcast television and radio, hardcopy newspapers, magazines, books and other documents, and softcopy electronic books, web sites, and database access.”
I could quote on, but I think you get the idea — and if you don’t, check out the Wired magazine online story below, which explains the matter clearly enough, and refers to this proposal as “TIA [Total Information Awareness] cubed.” Total Information Awareness, in case you don’t remember, was a wild proposal for a full-scale, no-search-warrant, track-everyone’s activities computer program pushed hard by John Poindexter, Director of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office, and Poindexter himself had returned from the undead, having been consigned there for his role in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal which but let me leave the rest of the mind-spinning history to future computer programs.
I’m going to put some of my confederates I mean, associates to work monitoring the DARPA site regularly (actually, one of them already is and he passed this on to me). I’ve decided not to apply for LifeLog myself. Here’s the reason: Having read my Philip Dick and brushed up on him recently, thanks to Steven Spielberg’s movie Minority Report (which actually bore next to no relation to the Dick novella from which it was ostensibly “taken”), I’m waiting for the next round of DARPA proposals — you know, the one that will focus on finding and developing “precogs.” If we could just start in there, I suspect that we could skip the LifeLog gathering stage entirely. And that seems like such a reasonable way to go, though many of you may call me a dreamer.
Oh yes, and let me include here an appropriate companion piece, thanks to yet another eagle-eyed friend. CSO Magazine, which bills itself as “the resource for security executives,” did a poll of its subscribers, all “security executives” (evidently for corporations), and discovered, remarkably enough that of the 500-odd respondees — and who should know better — nearly a third (31%), taking Patriot Acts I and II into account, believe that the United States is “in jeopardy of becoming a police state.” And a whopping 41% believe that the Department of Homeland Security is not “providing timely and accurate information regarding terrorist threats.” (Only 27% believed they were.) From the mouths of babes as the saying goes. Tom
“LifeLog is interested in three major data categories: physical data, transactional data, and context or media data. “Anywhere/anytime” capture of physical data might be provided by hardware worn by the LifeLog user. Visual, aural, and possibly even haptic sensors capture what the user sees, hears, and feels. GPS, digital compass, and inertial sensors capture the user’s orientation and movements. Biomedical sensors capture the user’s physical state. LifeLog also captures the user’s computer-based interactions and transactions throughout the day from email, calendar, instant messaging, web-based transactions, as well as other common computer applications, and stores the data (or, in some cases, pointers to the data) in appropriate formats. Voice transactions can be captured through recording of telephone calls and voice mail, with the called and calling numbers as metadata. FAX and hardcopy written material (such as postal mail) can be scanned. Finally, LifeLog also captures (or at least captures pointers to) the tremendous amounts of context data the user is exposed to every day from diverse media sources, including broadcast television and radio, hardcopy newspapers, magazines, books and other documents, and softcopy electronic books, web sites, and database access.”
I could quote on, but I think you get the idea — and if you don’t, check out the Wired magazine online story below, which explains the matter clearly enough, and refers to this proposal as “TIA [Total Information Awareness] cubed.” Total Information Awareness, in case you don’t remember, was a wild proposal for a full-scale, no-search-warrant, track-everyone’s activities computer program pushed hard by John Poindexter, Director of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office, and Poindexter himself had returned from the undead, having been consigned there for his role in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal which but let me leave the rest of the mind-spinning history to future computer programs.
I’m going to put some of my confederates I mean, associates to work monitoring the DARPA site regularly (actually, one of them already is and he passed this on to me). I’ve decided not to apply for LifeLog myself. Here’s the reason: Having read my Philip Dick and brushed up on him recently, thanks to Steven Spielberg’s movie Minority Report (which actually bore next to no relation to the Dick novella from which it was ostensibly “taken”), I’m waiting for the next round of DARPA proposals — you know, the one that will focus on finding and developing “precogs.” If we could just start in there, I suspect that we could skip the LifeLog gathering stage entirely. And that seems like such a reasonable way to go, though many of you may call me a dreamer.
Oh yes, and let me include here an appropriate companion piece, thanks to yet another eagle-eyed friend. CSO Magazine, which bills itself as “the resource for security executives,” did a poll of its subscribers, all “security executives” (evidently for corporations), and discovered, remarkably enough that of the 500-odd respondees — and who should know better — nearly a third (31%), taking Patriot Acts I and II into account, believe that the United States is “in jeopardy of becoming a police state.” And a whopping 41% believe that the Department of Homeland Security is not “providing timely and accurate information regarding terrorist threats.” (Only 27% believed they were.) From the mouths of babes as the saying goes. Tom
A Spy Machine of DARPA’s Dreams
By Noah Shachtman
Wired online
May 20, 2003It’s a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program!
The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person’s life, index it and make it searchable.
What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?
The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.
To read more Schachtman click here
CHIEF SECURITY OFFICERS REVEAL CONCERNS ABOUT US GOVERNMENT SECURITY MEASURES
CSO Magazine
May 12, 2003Thirty-One Percent Fear US Will Become a Police State
While 33% Report They Receive Security Alerts Unavailable to PublicFramingham, MA–May 12, 2003–A new poll of 559 chief security officers (CSOs) and senior security executives conducted by IDG’s CSO magazine reveals some concerns about US government’s tactics to provide security. When considering the impacts of Patriot Acts I and II, a third of respondents (31%) say the US is in jeopardy of becoming a police state. Thirty-six percent (36%) do not believe the Bush Administration’s goal to change Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq will ultimately improve national security in the US. And 41% of CSOs do not believe the terror threat information provided by the US Department of Homeland Security is timely and accurate.