Total Info System Impossible?

from the boondoggle dept

There have been a ton of articles (including a few here) recently about the new Total Information Awareness project the US government is throwing money at. However, this Wired article talks to a few folks who know something about information gathering and data mining and they think that it’s unlikely the system would ever work very well. At best, they say it’ll turn up a bunch of false positives for every actual identification of a potential terrorist. The cost of following up on all those false positives is likely to far outweigh the benefits of catching a real terrorist. The article also mentions that there are some people who are refusing to work on the project because they are morally opposed to the idea.


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