ACXIOM & "TIA": MATCH MADE IN HELL

By now, regular Defense Tech readers are familiar with Acxiom, the data aggregation company that's supplying your personal information to government data-mining efforts like CAPPS II. Today, it came to light that the company was being considered as a supplier for Total Information Awareness, Darpa's uber-database project.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center has obtained internal Darpa e-mail about using Acxiom in TIA experiments. According to one message, Jennifer Barrett, Acxiom's Chief Privacy Officer, gave Darpa advice on how to keep objections to TIA to a minimum.

"One of the key suggestions she made is that people will object to Big Brother, wide-coverage databases, but they don't object to use of relevant data for specific purposes that we can all agree on. Rather than getting all the data for any purpose, we should start with the goal, tracking terrorists to avoid attacks, and then identify the data needed (although we can't define all of this, we can say that our templates and models of terrorists are good places to start)," wrote Darpa's Lt. Col. Doug Dyer. "Already, this guidance has shaped my thinking."