Move over plastics, there's a new phrase for the future - total information awareness.

Or so argues Victor Rozek over at ITJungle.com's The Four Hundred online newsletter. Due to continuing concerns regarding national security, he contends that Choicepoint and it's competing data aggregators will be on the look-out for more than a few good men (and women) over the next few years:

"Total Information Awareness" was the concept suggested by former admiral, national security advisor, and five-count felon John Poindexter, (conviction later overturned on a technicality). The idea was to fuse information resident in intelligence databases with the data from public and commercial databases. Add pattern recognition software, stir, and voila, everyone suddenly has an "information signature" that will supposedly allow astute analysts to differentiate the bad guys from the good. Well, apparently too many good guys objected to federal intrusion into their private business, so "Total Information Awareness" morphed into "Terrorist Information Awareness," and the project proceeded much as it had before.

The government, however, soon realized that even with its formidable spying capability, there was a great deal of information it did not possess, nor could it legally gather. Data-massing efforts were historically focused on foreign targets. Domestic surveillance was regulated by the courts and therefore required the annoying preamble of probable cause.

But no such restrictions existed in the private sector. Corporations could gather whatever information they wished about their clients or prospective clients. And those who didn't have the in-house capability to collect their own data could purchase it from firms whose sole function was trafficking in personal information. After 9/11, the government became another customer, trading in its court-sanctioned one-rod fishing expeditions for drift nets.

One of the companies the government turned to is ChoicePoint, an unauthorized collector of private information. It boasts a database of over 10 billion records and sells information to some 35 government agencies and about 400 of the nation's Fortune 1000. Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland called ChoicePoint "the world's largest private intelligence operation." Intelligence, in this instance, is a relative term since the company recently announced it was socially-engineered out of personal records belonging to 145,000 unsuspecting Americans.

But in terms of job opportunity, companies like ChoicePoint may be the future of the domestic IT industry.

Click on over to read the rest if you want to feel good about job security in the investigative world. If you want to feel good about personal privacy, best just point your browser elsewhere. Rozek cites a GAO report that lists some 200 or so data mining projects planned or proceeding within the federal government alone.

To take a gander at that report, click here (PDF).

-- MDT

Labels: database, GAO