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January 03, 2003
Friday
 
 
Information Awareness Office
Dale Amon (Belfast, Northern Ireland)  Privacy & Panopticon

Whilst looking for something entirely different I stumbled across the public domain slides and script for a talk given by John Poindexter: "Information Awareness Office Overview". Since there was some discussion about this DARPA research project a few weeks ago, I have acquired copies and placed them on our server.

That way, if a slashdot occurs, instead of causing headaches for some unsuspecting research site administrator, I'll only annoy the ISP that hosts us.

You will probably want to do "the rightclick download thing" as these are pdf documents.

  • Information Awareness Office Overview script

  • Information Awareness Office Overview slides

Cheers!

Addendum: If there is sufficient interest, I will acquire and post some of the other talks.

Comments

Don't you find it interesting that the "spooky" logo has been replaced by one far less ominous?

Cheers

bt


Posted by Braun Tacon at January 3, 2003 03:18 AM

Yes. It's like he put the original logo out there to see if we'd notice ...


Posted by Michael at January 3, 2003 04:19 AM

Or some staffer decided it was a scary dystopian program and quite deliberately designed the logo to point this up; it sneaked past his bosses due to their lack of any comprehension of the word "orwellian", and was only hauled offline when the bosses started getting memos passed up the line saying "what the f*ck were they thinking?"


Posted by Julian Morrison at January 3, 2003 04:38 AM

Not nearly as Orwellian as the posters Perry found last year. If you think about it, there are two primary graphic elements in this logo. One is taken off the back of a dollar bill; and the other is the Middle East.


Posted by Dale Amon at January 3, 2003 09:55 AM

And no, I'm not saying it means the dollar bill. The eye in the pyramid logo goes back to the founding fathers of the country. Jefferson might have had something to do with it. I'm sure someone has the history at their fingertips. I'm rather occupied at the moment with an R&D project...


Posted by Dale Amon at January 3, 2003 01:14 PM

And oh yeah... note how prominently the light shineth on Saudi Arabia...


Posted by Dale Amon at January 3, 2003 01:18 PM

The eye-in-pyramid is allegedly a symbol of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. It also figures prominently in right-wing conspiracy theory as the symbol of the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria ("Illuminati" for short), amusingly satirized by Robert Anton Wilson in the Illuminati trilogy.

I sent two emails and left a voice message at the IAO, asking for info on who designed the logo. Never got a reply.


Posted by James Galasyn at January 4, 2003 06:09 PM