David Reed shows how ESP research and Total Information Awareness are based on the same fallacies:
The DoD, by the way, supported a bunch of ESP research that tended to confirm the potential of ESP in predicting behaviors of our cold war enemies.
Now this idea of extracting reliable and meaningful information from massive data collection arises. A scientist might ask, what would falsify the underlying hypothesis? Is there a null hypothesis at all?
In fact, the privacy and liberty folks, by expressing concern in the form of risks to "privacy" tend to reinforce the belief that there is any real investigatory information that can be extracted by inference from a very noisy and randomly selected pile of information.
The problem with statistical inference is that it is not neutral with respect to hypotheses you are testing, nor with respect to control of the sampling process.
I think he's on to something, but it's worth pointing out that most of the "privacy" activists are worried about due process — being fingered by a bad algorithm without the opportuninty to defend yourself agains the charges — as much as they are about the investigatory power of TIA.
