Image: Wikipedia
Would you trust a government surveillance program with an Illuminati-esque logo with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars? Well, that already happened long ago.Before the NSA was given power over dragnet surveillance through programs like PRISM in 2007, it tried to launch a rather ham-handed approach to terrorism surveillance called the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, according to a slew of documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request. It could be considered the direct predecessor to programs the NSA has now.Short of combing through all your information, the TIA program proposed to cross-reference the following:Whether harnessed by terrorists or pure misfortune, it's unclear how ready populations of America would be for an unknown disease—and it's safer to defer to cautious prevention rather than complacency. A couple pages of the document proposed to model computerized epidemics (in this case, a strain of flu in Pittsburgh) to inform policymakers. Obviously, testing epidemic policies on a real population was out of the question, see page 4 on the slides below:A couple other wacky features the program proposed:
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- Bank records
- Travel documents
- Cell phone usage
- Credit card records
- FBI files
- Medical records
- Emails
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- A Human Identification at a Distance subdivision (HumanID) that would use biometric sensors to identify people at 150 meters, rain or shine, incognito or not.
- A Biological Surveillance Program to catch epidemics before they happened—this would have counted people's coughs, monitored for disease-related web searches and conducted surveys that would have measured for spikes in disease activity
- A speech-to-text program that would automatically translate English, Chinese and Arabic, as well as text auto-translators that would be able to mine foreign language newspapers and media for information