Fighting a war on ourselves requires finding the enemy within. The technology and information systems to monitor the behavior of each of us within the collective of a Neurosphere continues to evolve, and billions of dollars have gone to improve the technology. The impact on the non-warfighting side seems to me difficult to understate; tools toward the anthropology of the collective consciousness.

“Congress supposedly killed Total Information Awareness, Darpa’s far-flung effort to comb databases in search of terrorists. But that doesn’t mean the authorities are finished sorting through the records of Americans to expose evildoers. Many analysts think bits of TIA still exist on the covert, “black” side of the Pentagon’s ledger.

NORA (Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness)

Acumen (Adaptive Concept Understanding From Modeled Enterprise Networks)

NIMD (Novel Intelligence From Massive Data)”

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000752.html

There are questionable uses that go to the definition of who our enemies really are.

“With practice, you can recognize the video spies in the city of Washington, DC. To a casual observer, they resemble lampposts. Some of the cameras have a 360 degree view and magnify by a factor of 10-17. Some are equipped with night vision and can zoom in on a target well enough to read text on a written page or look into a building. Most are placed at locations that would not come to mind as primary terrorist targets: Smithsonian Castle, the U.S. Department of Labor, Dupont Circle, Union Station, Wisconsin Avenue, the Old Post Office, and the Banana Republic in Georgetown. Though the targets they view may not stand out as particularly vulnerable to terrorism, the cameras are placed strategically for the purpose of monitoring demonstrations and protests. One of the first occasions for their use was a demonstration in April 2000 against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).”

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Jan2005/kalukin0105.html

There are business drivers for technology development as well; the Mohomine Classifier

“Organising and maintaining vast amounts of content inside corporations is an ever more costly and daunting task as the volumes of unstructured content grow. This data must be classified, whether in support of a custom built application or an enterprise application targeted at CRM, Supply Chain, Marketing, Document Management, or any other specific business problem. Further, as the amount of data those applications handle increases dramatically and alters in nature, the performance and flexibility required to support taxonomy changes becomes key to the overall success of the application.”

Or this.

“Systems Research & Development’s NORA technology can take information from disparate sources about people and their activities and find obscure, nonobvious relationships. For example, it might discover that an applicant for a job at a casino shares a telephone number with a known criminal and issue an alert to the hiring manager.”

http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/story/0,10801,70041,00.html