Total Information Incompetence

by John Bottoms

I don’t know how many earnest news analyses and editorials I’ve read over the last couple of weeks on convicted felon John Poindexter’s infamous Total Information Awareness (TIA as in “¡Mí tía es muy gorda!”) system, funded in the new Homeland Security Act.  All correctly conclude that such a system is unlikely to catch terrorists, but will definitely deprive Americans of much of their remaining privacy (i.e. anonymity), and will inevitably be used as a cudgel to squelch political competition and dissent.  

The idea, in case you’ve spent a month in Vanuatu , is that Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will create this giant computer database system to catalog and sort all of your public records.  So let’s say they get lots of money and buy a bunch of big computers and hire lots of programmers to create the world’s biggest database software system.  (Most likely, they’ll subcontract the design and implementation to Larry “National ID” Ellison’s Oracle Software, which is ready to enter the big leagues as it distances itself from a major political scandal in its home state of California .)  

Say I use my credit or debit card to buy a book at Barnes & Noble.  The bank only knows my name, SS number, and the date on which I spent so much money at B&N, which isn’t very useful without knowing what I actually bought.  So TIA really needs the records from B&N, and thousands of such companies, each of which organize their data in different formats, and may not even record all the information the government wants.  For example, if I pay cash, B&N doesn’t even know who I am.  TIA isn’t going to write a different software back end to convert each vendor’s data into their own format for storing and processing, especially since companies change computer and software systems all the time.  They will inevitably require companies to make regular TIA data uploads in a specified format, forcing them to add a new Homeland Security accounting staff, and raising their costs and prices (another hidden tax).  In order to avoid supporting redundant databases, companies will probably just switch to the TIA system, supported by still more Oracle software.  

But we can’t have citizens maintain any bit of anonymity by paying cash, so the system will shortly add a requirement that I show my government-issued ID.  But many such IDs don’t have my SSN, and having printed data typed in manually by a sales clerk would be slow and unreliable, so the next logical step is to require a national ID card with a mag strip or embedded chip so the clerk can just swipe it through the reader like my credit card (still more Oracle software!).

So TIA really requires three separate but interconnected subsystems to operate: TIA’s computers and database software, regular and correct uploads from businesses in compatible formats, and a reliable and easily read national ID.  Getting any of these systems to work would be a giant task, but having all of them up and running concurrently, especially for our competence-challenged federal government, is a joke.  Consider the bureaucratic nightmare we call the IRS and multiply it by 10 to get an idea of the size of this boondoggle.

And now we’re finally getting to the heart of the matter.  Under the slogan “We’re doing something,” they’re really creating just another monstrous boondoggle to spend your tax dollars.  And maybe that’s good because every dollar wasted on such things is a dollar not spent killing people, and brings them one dollar closer to inevitable financial ruin.

But sadly, even our federal boondoggles just ain’t what they used to be.  When I was a kid they squandered my parent’s money on cool stuff like hydrogen bombs and trips to the moon, now it’s just another boring information bureaucracy straight out of Terry Gilliam’s brilliantly satiric movie Brazil (“That’s Tuttle not Buttle, you idiot!”).

But don’t worry.  When the alert Barnes and Noble salesperson notifies Homeland Security that a group of nervous-looking Middle Eastern men just bought a stack of books with titles like How to Blow Up Anything, she’ll still be ignored by agents too busy trying to extract useful information from their latest wet dream technology to actually catch terrorists.

My advice: Dump Barnes &Noble and buy Oracle (ORCL).