TOTAL FACEBOOK AWARENESS !!!!!!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: http://verbellum.wordpress.com/2011/01/ ... awareness/
January 22, 2011



by jimulacrum



Back in 2002, a frightening project was unveiled by the federal government. The project operated under the vague-sounding Office of Information Awareness (OIA), a department of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal of the project was an ambitious task: Total Information Awareness (TIA), the collection, indexing, and connection of all available information about every person in the United States.

Even with the salted wound of nine-eleven still ripe for abuse, many Americans expressed vehement opposition to TIA and the OIA. Even the least politically aware rube in the entire country has a sense of when a line is being crossed, and collecting all the personal information of every citizen is clearly far beyond the limit to which anyone should be comfortable sacrificing privacy for perceived security.

In 2003/2004, after some public backlash, the program was taken out from under the auspices of IAO by a congressional mandate. However, it doesn’t take an especially active imagination to consider it very unlikely that TIA was terminated, only hidden and de-publicized, its name changed and its budget buried under piles of paper bearing a “CLASSIFIED” stamp. A tyrant’s desire to spy on everyone doesn’t just disappear with a slap on the wrist.

There were some obvious legal challenges to TIA from the beginning, beyond mere public disapproval. Government agencies are not permitted to scour personal data on all U.S. citizens with neither warrant nor cause. Additionally, despite theories to the contrary, the federal government is not some omnipotent being that can produce a comprehensive dossier on anyone at a moment’s notice.

It takes a great deal of time, money, and manpower to assemble such a vast body of knowledge about hundreds of millions of people. Hiring half the country as spies is not feasible; it takes a creative solution to cover these kinds of legal and resource gaps.

Enter Facebook. Originally conceived by Mark Zuckerberg et al as a means for college students and alumni to connect, the gargantuan social network has become a worldwide phenomenon. Its influence on human civilization has been remarkable, a prime example of the power of the internet and global interconnectedness. It has applications beyond count—from gaming to genealogy research to targeted marketing. As many people have learned one way or another, it can also be an incredible stalking tool.

Every Facebook profile is basically a template for exactly the kind of dossier that was planned under the TIA project. It has a place for your full name, aliases, date of birth, hometown, current city, past and present employers, schools, email addresses, websites, phone numbers, home addresses, business associations, personal interests, entertainment preferences, religious and political affiliations, photographs, event attendance, interpersonal communications, and so much more. The template is there, just waiting for you to sign up, click the “I Agree” box, and volunteer your information—with a veritable flood of marketing and social pressure to encourage you.

A regularly active user with a fully fleshed-out profile is an open book. Any person with access to the person’s profile could, within a very short time, learn all kinds of things that would take an alphabet-soup bureaucracy years, piles of money, and numerous warrants to put together. All of it is right there for the picking.

I’m not suggesting that the federal government owns or actively monitors Facebook users’ information. Going back to my previous observation, it would be impractical to do so. But information posted on Facebook, even if it’s made “hidden” by privacy preferences, is available to any government agency that can rationalize acquiring it and serve the social network with a request. (Also, any data-mining company could establish a fun, time-wasting application through which to secure permission to access your information.)

I won’t entertain any foolish arguments along the lines of “I don’t have anything to hide,” not even to refute them. If that’s your attitude about widespread surveillance and forfeiture of rights, the United States is the wrong country for you, and to be frank, your ignorant obedience harms us all. Anyone who can connect a few dots can see that Facebook is a private-sector analog of Total Information Awareness, a program that was rightly rejected by nearly everyone. It is astonishingly more successful than TIA ever could have been, not to mention more cost-effective and legally sound.

A creative solution, indeed. Do you have a Facebook?