On the alternately terrifying and incomprehensible diagrams created for the Total Information Awareness program.

HELLO ECHELON!
http://www.stop-fascism.org/images/oia.GIF

Also is it possible to make heads or tails of that last diagram in under 72 hours?

Also, that is not a Uranium model, whatever it is. I think its supposed to represent netwerks of terrorist contacts, or something.

Amateurist, do you know anything about America?

1. Actually this makes perfect sense to me. I don't see what's so perplexing about it. The only 'new' thing about it is putting the "collaborative multi-agency working environment" in there. HAHA WHATEVER DUDE. I like the repeated use of 'options' in these things - it's meant to symbolize the various ways to go and stop terrorists, but when I look at it I think 'a. axe b. bomb c. lasers from space'

2. This is another DARPA project that has nothing to do with TIA really. They already have a laptop that sorta does this for Serbo-Croatian and it's in the field. Yes, voice recognition and xlation w/ synthesis. Yes, we live in the future.

3. This is an example of the kind of behavior patterns that the advanced analytical engines are supposedly going to be able to recognize and follow, from gabillions of tabulated gigabytes of raw data. HAHA WHATEVER DUDE. I hope you have fun with all that contract money, though. Can I get a slice of that?

4. Once again I don't know what's so confusing about this one. "Transactions" = fone calls & txtmsgs & email & chat, goes into big fat unrestricted DBs, is filtered by prewritten 'queries' that find the juicy bits and then everybody looks at it and then I suppose whatever they produce "Uncle Mogo's gonna do sumthin BAYAD" goes into another database and sits there to wait for a postmortem congressional inquiry. I added a little bit of my own presumptions there.

5. Once again 'options': I'll shoot the Mac-10.

Virtual collaborative environment = that thing I laughed at in #1
Structured argumentation = "arguments" here I think refers to indications of activity that would not be readily apparent without, say, a policy axe to grind. Who knows or cares what they really mean.
Corporate Memory = an institution documents and records everything so it doesn't make the same mistakes over and over. Once again, I've never seen this pulled off and I doubt I ever will, in the private or public sector. Fuck off wasting my time with this shit.
Knowledge Discovery = what it sounds like. In high school we called in learning.
I have to admit the arrows in this one are a little disturbing and backwards, at least the way I always learned the "Intelligence Cycle" went the other way.

Okay, the big one. Amateurist is going to owe me a beer at least.

6. The green square called 'Development' encompasses all the things that need to be done to develop a model for terrorist behavior. Past observed behavior is compiled, plus information on why they did it and what they were trying to get across when they did it (motivational & intent signatures respectively). Then it moves on to 'Operations' where you use the historical info to build prevention and warning models that are overlaid on to 'all source information input' (those big fat databases we saw earlier). The results of this complex data mining are used to generate projections about terrorist activity (attack/no attack = do something now/stare at it a little longer) and then this info gets passed on to 'Options' AGAIN or if it looks spooky but not immediately threatening we analyze it further (the 'analytical process' and 'intervention options' boxes here are like having a little box in the corner of the ATP cycle (remember biology) labeled "muscle activity."
The 'motivation' box and 'support information operations' bits are about PSYOP basically. If you know why somebody wants to blow himself up at a bus station (eg he's a second class citizen with no job, no prospects and little education and he believes that stuff about the virgins) then you can attempt to perform a 'hearts and minds' type thingee where you make him content to never put on that fancy plastique belt.

I think that covers everything really. I think the mushroom cloud one is easily the stupidest and/or most disturbing. I doubt anybody really understands that besides the guy who made it, and he's evidently confused himself.

You're right that with a little staring these become moderately comprehensible (some, like the translator one, are disturbing precisely because they are so obvious)--what's funny is the levels of euphemism and doublespeak, which I see you find it easier to navigate than I (a skill that will no doubt help your job prospects if you end up in the private sector).

I also like how the charts seem overly labyrinthine, like they took a simple structure like a half-circle and twisted it around until it looked like a double helix crossed with reindeer antlers--as if their very obscurity will be daunting enough to encourage people to put money in DARPA's lap. Or just scare people, I dunno.

At the same time I want to reiterate the point that these systems are quite unlikely to be implemented in the near future. It's taken long enough to deal with current tech standards - 802.11 et al. I doubt that any such mechanism will be in place and be useful to anyone, for 'security' purposes or otherwise, until long after Bush2 has reached his term limit.

But the things you're describing aren't really that difficult to grasp, and yet they're being presented in overblown and unclear ways. I mean, the "knowledge discovery" lingo aside, those arrows do not point in sane directions, and the slides are far, far too cluttered and busy.

I should go on but I'm tired and have suddenly lost all my energy.

Nate - everything you say comes out in a foreign language AND it has a tape-delay simulator.

Sorry, my mistake, I read your inital comment as 'margarinized'...and maybe (unlike me) most people don't do their best thinking whilst hunkered down in front of E! smashing a stick of margarine into the sugar bowl and licking it clean.