FITUG e.V. Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft

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

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 20:22:43 -0500 To: politech@politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: "Too Much Information" on Poindexter's TIA, from The New Yorker Send reply to: 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."

[...]

---------------------------------------------------------------------- --- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---

------- End of forwarded message -------

Zurück