The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity. The Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as “entities” — linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events.
“We don’t realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we’re leaving traces everywhere,” says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots – analyzing and aggregating them – in a way that we haven’t thought about. It’s one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with.”
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