Tell Us What's Going to Happen: Information Feeds to the War on Terror: Intro: "We want to know things before they occur. Anticipate, react, prevent. This idea is embedded not only in counter-terrorism policy, but in the cultural narratives produced by television and cinema. Television programs such as 24 or CSI, and movies such as The Conversation, The End of Violence, Minority Report, and The Siege are self reflexive mirrors of the U.S. war on terror. Through tricky technology systems like the Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX) and Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) and Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) and TIPOFF and AFIS and VICAP, America seeks policies and programs -- read this as machines and software -- that will anticipate terrorist attacks in order to stop them before they can occur. The desired outcome is complete deterrence. If this outcome was achieved, it would be the most mighty feat of prognostication and prevention ever conceived.
The reason? Doing so would require the real time synthesis and analysis of volumes of data equal to something like the number of stars in the universe. Criminal justice technology systems produce voluminous information flows. Billions of bytes of data are constantly on the move among police agencies describing individuals, their criminal histories, assets, debt, locations at particular times, purchase patterns, biometric identifiers (fingerprints, photographs, DNA samples) and other aspects of the people or the activities they are thought to have performed. At any given moment, thousands of inquiries are sent through dozens of regional, national, and international systems seeking answers to questions about people's identity, where they are, what they have done, or what more other agencies and agents know about these individuals. In 2005 the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) averaged 4.5 million inquiries per day."
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posted by johannes,
Monday, September 25, 2006
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