Blog Post #10: What I Learned During EOTO Presentations #2

Total Information Awareness

I really enjoyed all of the presentations, but the one that stood out to me the most was the topic of "Total Information Awareness." I had known that the concept of the TSA was birthed out of 9/11, but I never knew that there were prior attempts to increase national security. In all honesty, the design of technology of using data to determine if people were a security threat in the early 2000s is admirable, but obviously had to have had its hiccups. 

The Guardian writes that, post 9/11, the U.S. came eerily close to becoming a surveillance state. Edward Snowden explained that the American public should have expected this, but they chose not to. He states that, "the false claim that expanding state power was necessary to avoid certain death from further terrorist atrocities has led to decades of public indifference." 

It could be debated that the 9/11, and the use of Total Information Awareness led to the lack of public outcry regarding privacy breaches, as we have previously studied. The production of Total Information Awareness provided the government a massive loophole regarding warrantless searches. The combination of this and the Patriot Act allowed the government to burst through any door or window they wanted, regardless of "constitutional protection", and search anything if they deemed you a national security risk. This eventually led to the programs, DARPA and CAPPS 2.

According to Wired, this mass collection of data was eventually abandoned by the government and funneled into agencies like the TSA and expanding national security budgets. But now, massive tech companies like FaceBook and Google do the same exact thing as what Total Information Awareness strived to do, and the public does not even bat an eye. As Wired explains, "as Total Information Awareness was being disassembled in Washington, DC, a similar system emerged, and began to gather momentum, in Silicon Valley." This is now a popular business model that allows social media companies to determine what advertisements you will respond to, what products you will buy, and even predict your keystrokes before they happen. 

Because of the long-term benefits of having personalized ads and auto-filled searches, we don't see that we are still living under Total Information Awareness. It is the same, it is just shaped a little differently twenty years later. These technology geniuses, like Zuckerberg, have taken this data and are making a large profit off of it.  

In closing, I enjoyed all of the EOTO presentations, but I was thoroughly interested in Total Information Awareness. I had no clue that there was a precursor to the TSA, and it was interesting, albeit frightening, that technology companies kept the technology and created something just as invasive.

Works Cited

“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” DARPA RSS, www.darpa.mil/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2024.

DiResta, Renee. “How the Tech Giants Created What DARPA Couldn’t.” Wired, Conde Nast, 29 May 2018, www.wired.com/story/darpa-total-informatio-awareness/.

“‘Panic Made Us Vulnerable’: How 9/11 Made the US Surveillance State – and the Americans Who Fought Back.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 4 Sept. 2021, www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/04/surveillance-state-september-11-panic-made-us-vulnerable.