ADVISE is capable of cross-matching material from websites and blog posts to government records and personal data. Techies, ponder this: The Feds can take ten-terabyte gulps of data and process it in under a minute. As good as that may be for advancing scientific research, it does not bode well for personal privacy.
As I understand it, massively scalable, grid- or blade-based computing architectures based on commodity components connected by 10Gb Ethernet networks and Core XGE Ethernet-based backbone switches are delivering over one terabyte/minute table scanning rates in a variety of available Data Warehouse Appliance configurations. Another model, "share-nothing" architecture, is the key to the MIT Media Lab's new petabyte storage, terabit I/O bandwidth "Human Speechome" project. That is one of the largest and highest performing commercial systems that I am aware of. And you know the Feds are way ahead of that curve.
And now, the Feds have a great Beta site for all of their machinations: Singapore. Wired Magazine recently reported on the re-birth of TIA/ADVISE and the work of AJP in rolling-out the tightly controlled country's internal surveillance and data mining program. Dubbed Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning (RAHS), the new system is being deployed by Poindexter protegees. Singapore is widely expected to fine-tune the system, work out any bugs, then sell it back to us. It's just so convenient that I can't avoid the conclusion that the old "nod-and-wink" is at work to circumvent the will of the Congress of the United States and the opinions of our citizens. Just peachy.
A worthy data mining and privacy guru, Jeff Jonas of IBM (check out his fine blog), adds this humorous take: "Data Mining, noun, 1. Torturing data until it confesses ... and if you torture it enough, it will confess to anything." Therein lies the conundrum for privacy advocates. I can guarantee that outsourcing our systems development and beta testing to entities that are beyond our authority and public oversight will only exacerbate that conflict. But then again, that's how AJP has always worked.
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