All the King's Horses...

In November it was reported that the CIA has given birth to something called the Open Source Center. It sounds like Total Information Awareness revamped, only rebranded to sound less Big Brotherish.

The center is designed to gather all kinds of unclassified information and piece together a broad web of information that will give a better sense of where trouble is likely to arise. The International Herald Tribune says that the new center will "absorb the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a branch of the CIA that has already expanded beyond its historical duty of translating foreign broadcasts and periodicals to study Web sites and more obscure sources like T-shirt slogans in countries of interest," as well as sermons in mosques and local newspapers in rural China.

This is an ambitious project, if an unsurprising one in an era when computers and nanotechnology make such globalized fishing expeditions possible. The Dutch government is already embarking upon a similar project of tracking all its citizens "from cradle to grave." They plan to feed the data into a computer, which would flag certain people for intervention from a young age. Crime prevention, they say. The specialization of education, of welfare benefits. The greater good and all that. We'll see, I suppose. But against that backdrop, I worry that the model of information-assemblage we are pursuing in the United States is for the lesser good.

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