On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 04:37:12PM -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
> [a reader of the archives writes, in response to my wondering if
> there was something fishy about the TIA defunding]
>
> I have moved recently to DC in order, in part, to start work at a computer
> science research lab at University of Maryland. This lab is funded in large
> part by DARPA, but also by NSF, NSA, and other relatively creepy gov't
> agencies.
>
> Some of the work I will be doing (or, more accurately, some of the work that
> people in this lab are doing which I am familiar with) amounts to
> politically safe versions of TIA. So we're working with Howard University's
> computer science department to build a TIA-like system using all of the
> Freedman's Bureau material. Likewise, we're doing a project, funded by the
> NSA, using Holocaust Museum data.
>
> In both cases, you have data sets which are 1) politically unobjectionable,
> but 2) similar enough to TIA-like datasets in that both are "whole
> population" sets (though much more constrained than TIA would be). The idea
> is to develop some of the algorithms, techniques, and tools "in the clear,
> in public" using politically unobjectionable datasets. Then take the lessons
> learned into organizations like NSA, behind the veil of secrecy, to see
> whether or how those lessons apply to something like TIA.
>
> DARPA and NSA funders talk freely about the connections between these
> projects and TIA. I cannot speak to the larger funding issues, but these
> projects at UMD are *funded* and moving forward and do not rely (yet) on
> 2004 FY appropriations (well, near as I can tell...).
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu