DARPA WANTS YOUR LIFE INDEXABLE AND SEARCHABLE

(I wonder how far this little baby has come along since this story was written in 2003? . . . )

DEFENSETECH
May 20th, 2003

It’s a mem­ory aid! A robotic assis­tant! An epi­demic detec­tor! An all-​​seeing, ultra-​​intrusive spy­ing pro­gram!

The Pentagon is about to embark on a stun­ningly ambi­tious research project designed to gather every con­ceiv­able bit of infor­ma­tion about a person’s life, index it and make it search­able.

What national secu­rity experts and civil lib­er­tar­i­ans want to know is, why the hell would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?

The embry­onic LifeLog pro­gram would take every e-​​mail you’ve sent or received, every pic­ture you’ve taken, every web page you’ve surfed, every phone call you’ve had, every TV show you’ve watched, every mag­a­zine you’ve read, and dump it into a giant data­base.

All of this — and more — would be com­bined with a GPS trans­mit­ter, to keep tabs on where you’re going; audio-​​visual sen­sors, to cap­ture all that you see or say; and bio­med­ical mon­i­tors, to keep track of your health.

This gigan­tic amal­ga­ma­tion of per­sonal infor­ma­tion could then be used to “trace the ‘threads’ of an individual’s life,” to see exactly how a rela­tion­ship or events devel­oped, accord­ing to a brief­ing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, LifeLog’s spon­sor.

Someone with access to the data­base could “retrieve a spe­cific thread of past trans­ac­tions, or recall an expe­ri­ence from a few sec­onds ago or from many years ear­lier by using a search-​​engine inter­face.“

On the sur­face, the project seems like the lat­est in a long line of DARPA’s “blue sky” research efforts, most of which never make it out of the lab. But Steven Aftergood, a defense ana­lyst with the Federation of American Scientists, says he is wor­ried.

With its con­tro­ver­sial Total Information Awareness data­base project, DARPA already is plan­ning on track­ing all of an individual’s “trans­ac­tional data” — like what we buy and who gets our e-​​mail.

Aftergood said he believes LifeLog could go far beyond that, adding phys­i­cal infor­ma­tion (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this trans­ac­tional data.

“LifeLog has the poten­tial to become some­thing like ‘TIA cubed,’” he said.

My Wired News arti­cle has details on the LifeLog pro­gram.

THERE’S MORE: The idea of com­mit­ting every­thing in your life to a machine is nearly sixty years old. In 1945, Vannevar Bush — who headed the White House’s Office of Scientific Research and Development dur­ing World War II — pub­lished a land­mark Atlantic Monthly arti­cle, “As We May Think.” In it, he describes a “memex” — a “device in which an indi­vid­ual stores all his books, records, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and which is mech­a­nized so that it may be con­sulted with exceed­ing speed and flex­i­bil­ity.“

Minicomputer vision­ary Gordon Bell, now work­ing at Microsoft, sees his “MyLifeBits” project as a ful­fill­ment of Bush’s vision.

There are other com­mer­cial and aca­d­e­mic efforts to weave a life into fol­low­able threads, includ­ing par­al­lel pro­cess­ing prophet David Gelernter’s “Scopeware” and “Haystack,” from MIT’s David Karger.

AND MORE: LifeLog may even­tu­ally dwarf Total Information Awareness, DARPA’s ultra-​​invasive data­base effort. But “TIA” could wind up being pretty damn large on its own, with 50 times more data than the Library of Congress, accord­ing to the Associated Press.

AND MORE: Lovers of civil lib­er­ties, you now have noth­ing to fear. Henceforth, the creepy “Total Information Awareness” pro­gram will be known as “Terrorism Information Awareness.“

Feel bet­ter?

AND MORE: DARPA’s report to Congress on TIA is online here.