According to law professor Anita Ramasastry, the Total Information Awareness program has continued vitality in another form. The "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange", a/k/a the MATRIX, is sponsored by a compact of several U.S. states, operated by a private company, and funded in part by the U.S. Justice Department. That's some scary shit. And what does the Matrix do? According to Congressional testimony and news reports, it appears to do just what TIA would have done, if enacted: Tie together government and commercial databases in order to allow federal and state law enforcement entities to conduct detailed searches on particular individuals' dossiers. The Matrix web site states that the data compiled will include criminal histories, driver's license data, vehicle registration records, and significant amounts of public data record entries. Company officials have refused to disclose more specific details about the nature and sources of the data. According to news reports, the data may also include credit histories, driver's license photographs, marriage and divorce records, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and the names and addresses of family members, neighbors and business associates. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the type of data that the Matrix compiles will not be further expanded. And information in today's commercial databases encompasses purchasing habits, magazine subscriptions, income and job histories, and much more. Soon, we may be profiled based on what we read and buy, and how we live. In Congressional testimony, a Florida lawmaker, Paula B. Dockery, described how the Matrix works: It combines government records with information from "public search businesses" into a "data-warehouse." There, dossiers are reviewed by "specialized software" to identify "anomalies" using "mathematical analysis." If "anomalies" are spotted, they will then be scrutinized by personnel who will search for evidence of terrorism or other crimes. As with TIA, the idea is plainly that of data mining -- the concept that searches for patterns in this data (including so-called "anomalies") that can identify individuals possibly involved in terrorist or other criminal activity. But as with TIA, this kind of "data mining" may be ineffective, and has severe downsides, including its privacy costs. Sourced from http://www.smartmobs.com/