FC: "Too Much Information" on Poindexter's TIA, from The New Yorker

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?021209ta_talk_hertzberg

   December 12, 2002 | home
   COMMENT
   TOO MUCH INFORMATIONIssue of 2002-12-09
   Posted 2002-12-02

   When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of
   illuminating the present, Jules Verne got some things right in his
   time, Aldous Huxley got others, and George Orwell got still others. In
   our time--in this terror-haunted interlude (we hope) of background-hum
   dread and well-founded paranoia--no literary divinator gets it righter
   than the sci-fi pulp master Philip K. Dick, author of "Clans of the
   Alphane Moon" and dozens of other books, and inspirer of some of
   Hollywood's spookiest dystopias, including "Blade Runner," "Total
   Recall," and "Minority Report." And this is odd, given that he has
   been dead for twenty years. Too bad he's not still around. It would be
   interesting to get his take on the Information Awareness Office of the
   Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of
   Defense.

   The Information Awareness Office plays it so weird that one can't help
   suspecting that somebody on its staff might be putting us on. The
   Information Awareness Office's official seal features an occult
   pyramid topped with mystic all-seeing eye, like the one on the dollar
   bill. Its official motto is "Scientia Est Potentia," which doesn't
   mean "science has a lot of potential." It means "knowledge is power."
   And its official mission is to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate,
   demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and
   prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter
   asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness."

   [...]




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