The Information Awareness Office is a new DARPA program for large scale intelligence collection processing and analysis, being headed by Admiral John Poindexter, who did such good work for the country with his brilliant Iran-Contra program. Good thing he dodged those five felony indictments. IAO was set up around February. The logo itself is scary...a globe with a giant eye pyramid (ala $1 bill) gazing upon it from behind. Can't find an agency budget.

Update November 15, 2002 - This plan is now known as Total Information Awareness and has received renewed media attention in the United States.

November 22, 2002 - Agency Weighed, but Discarded, Plan Reconfiguring the Internet by John Markoff for the New York Times. Thanks to Eugen Leitl for the link.

November 14, 2002 - US gov's 'ultimate database' run by a felon by Thomas C Greene for The Register.

News articles:

• How one of the two brains behind the Iran-Contra scandal this week became one of America's most powerful men
• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to open a new office focused on providing informational awareness for national security
• Convicted Iran-Contra Figure to Head New Office

A better idea of what the IAO goals may be can be found in their business proposal solicitation.

Basically, investigate and build a system to integrate ALL information about EVERYONE from ALL sources, and develop automated system to help analyze it, even giving some allowances for "privacy protection technologies".

From BAA 02-08 Solicitation "OBJECTIVES: 1) Development of revolutionary technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories and associated privacy protection technologies; 2) Development of collaboration, automation, and cognitive aids technologies that allow humans and machines to think together about complicated and complex problems more efficiently and effectively; and 3) Development and implementation of an end-to-end, closed-loop prototype system to aid in countering terrorism through prevention by integrating technology and components from existing DARPA programs such as: Genoa, EELD (Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery), WAE (Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment), TIDES (Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization), HID (Human Identification at Distance), Bio-Surveillance; as well as programs resulting from the first two areas of this BAA and other programs."

Thanks to a friend of mine for the heads up and initial text.

Reciprocal links to: Dave Irwin.

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