EOTO: Total Information Awareness

     If I told you that someone is always watching you, would you believe me? It sounds sort of ridiculous to think about, especially in the land of the free, home of the brave that is America. But what if I told you that there was a system in place in the government designed around "detecting terrorists"? Would you still think that you are safe in your home country? Would you not trust the government? What would you do?

Total Information Awareness was created in November 2002 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a way to detect terrorists through analyzation of information. But the government was really using terrorist detection as an excuse to spy on people's personal data and information without their consent. This is already a not cool plan from the government, but it gets even worse. Total Information Awareness would constantly spy on an individual, grabbing tons and tons of important and personal data, all just to see how likely they would be a criminal. This was a horrible plan by the United States government, but nobody knew this was even going on back then. The government had free reign to do whatever they wanted with people's personal and even private information, just to benefit them. In September 2003, Congress stopped funding the Total Information Awareness program, which brought the end to Total Information Awareness... or did it?

    

    This gentleman here is Edward Snowden, a famous whistleblower that has been behind many leaks of government documents and programs. Snowden worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 2006 to 2009, before taking his talents to the National Security Agency (NSA). He then later became an intelligence contractor from 2009 until 2013, where he requested a medical leave of absence in order to go to Hong Kong. During his time at the NSA, he gathered data on many NSA activities, more importantly, secret service programs. So when Snowden flew to Hong Kong, he leaked all of these governmental secrets, a notable one being a court order to popular telecommunications company Verizon, which stated that they surrender all metadata (such as the numbers dialed and the length of the calls made) of millions of its subscribers. Edward Snowden really opened a lot of people's eyes as what the government was doing to them behind closed doors, and questioned how much power the government should really have.

Even though Edward Snowden successfully leaked governmental secrets, total information awareness still became prevalent, even after its apparent demise in 2003. While it may not be known to the public as total information awareness anymore, there still have been multiple projects similar to the original plan of total information awareness. Some of these projects include Genoa, Genysis, Communicator, and many others. These all harness the same potential as processing outside data, and turning into valuable information for the government to store. This makes it really unnerving for us living in the world today, as well as future generations because it does not feel like our information is safe, or that even we as people are safe. If the government is constantly watching over us, can the United States of America really be considered "land of the free?" Or is it really the "home of the unsafe?"