Fergie's Tech Blog

AlterNet: Weaponized Data

One of my favorit AlterNet columnists, Annalee Newitz, writes on AlterNet:

Something changed the Internet forever during the surreal years after the attack on the World Trade Center, when we went to war with a country whose citizens and leaders had nothing to do with what happened on September 11, 2001. Data mining was weaponized.

The ability to track hidden information patterns in vast piles of unsifted data, once the purview of obscure academic articles and some start-ups with weird names like Inktomi and Google, became the touchstone of government efforts to track down terrorists. If a lack of intel is what allowed the terrorists to get us, then by gum, the spooks were going to get as much intel as they possibly could.

posted by Fergie @ 9/05/2006 06:48:00 PM