The Information Awareness Office & DARPA

The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying information technology to counter transnational threats to national security. The IAO mission was to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness". Following public criticism that the development and deployment of these technologies could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003, although several of the projects run under IAO have continued under different funding.

Extensive criticism of the IAO in the traditional media and on the Internet has come from both the left and the right -- from civil libertarians and libertarians -- who believe that massive information aggregation and analysis technologies lead to a form of dataveillance that can threaten individual liberties. To some, these developments are seen as another step down the slippery slope to a totalitarian state. Others believe that development of these technologies is inevitable and that designing systems and policies to control their use is a more effective strategy than simple opposition that has resulted in research and development projects migrating into classified programs.


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