'Total Information Awareness' System: threat to privacy? (Security Beat).

Americans shouldn't worry too much about the Defense Department's controversial plans for a Total Information Awareness (TIA) System, according to Amitai Etzioni, a professor at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and author of "The Limits of Privacy."

The TIA system--now being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--is an experimental project attempting to search vast quantities of everyday commercial transactions, looking for links and patterns related to terrorist activities. The system would wade through electronic records of such transactions as applications for passports, visas and drivers licenses; reservations for airline tickets and rental cars; credit card purchases, and even medical data.

Civil rights advocates complain that TIA would intrude unnecessarily into the personal privacy of ordinary citizens. But Etzioni, speaking at a forum sponsored by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, said that personal privacy is much better protected in electronic communications, with its encryption technology, than it is in the traditional postal system. "Steaming open envelopes is an ancient art of espionage, well known to spies and mistresses," he said.

But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, was not persuaded. The danger was very real, he told the forum, that sooner or later, TIA would trample on privacy rights. "These things take on a life of their own," he said. "It will be very hard to control the evolution of this system." His fear, he said, is that it will end up "being used for entirely different purposes than it was intended."