Total information awareness
Launched in 2002, this Orwellian high-tech scheme to track down terrorists had all the hallmarks of a government boondoggle. Invoking imagined -- and sometimes unimaginable -- future technologies, TIA sought to aggregate and analyze public and private data on a massive scale, applying a predictive model that would correlate past activities to predict future acts. Yet for all its sci-fi underpinnings, many of the underlying technologies aren't as harebrained as they sound.

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