This has been one of the most challenging days as far as R&R goes, "Read & Retain!" Bet after you read this, your awakening rebegins again!

Scripted by the Associated Press back in (06/03/03); Michael J. (Always) Sniffen,

Pentagon created documents to state that the goal of the Department of Defense Advanced Research (and Experiments we disguise using the Rhetoric as)Projects Agency's (DARPA) LifeLog/Soon to be renamed Fakebook project is to develop software that deduces as well as influence behavioral patterns from monitoring people's daily activities, and DARPA officials say the initiative will in the future be used to improve military training as well as the memory of military commanders. LifeLog volunteers would be equipped with cameras, sensors, and microphones to record everything they feel, everything they do, and everywhere they go; the research is not classified, which means that LifeLog software could eventually be made available to private companies. According to the Pentagon documents, the LifeLog software would not just file geophysical and vital readings, but also emails, instant messages, phone calls, voice mails, snail mail, faxes, and Web-based transactions, as well as links to every radio and TV broadcast the subject hears and every publication, Website, or database he or she sees. The Center for Government and Technology's James X. Dempsey is concerned that such a tool could impact privacy: He notes that the government can easily get hold of the voluntarily collected information with a search warrant, as well as take such data from third parties via request or subpoena.There are also unanswered questions about how data culled from LifeLog software would be interpreted by government agencies and private organizations, not to mention whether the system will include adequate safeguards to shield Americans from errors. DARPA insists that LifeLog will not be used for clandestine surveillance, and the agency's Jan Walker says there is no relationship between LifeLog and the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness project.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/6001716.htm

From NYTimes Unless you work for the government or the Mafia, it's a great idea to keep a diary. I don't mean the minute-by-minute log that Florida Senator Bob Graham keeps in tidy, color-coded notebooks describing his clothes, meals and haircuts. That echoes the mythical Greek Narcissus. Rather, I have in mind the brief notation of the day's highlight, the amusing encounter or useful insight that will someday evoke a memory of yourself when young. Such a journal entry perhaps an e-mail to your encoded personal file can now be supplemented by scanned-in articles, poems or pictures to create a "commonplace book." You will then have a private memory-jogger and resource for reminiscence at family gatherings. But beware too much of a good thing. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, stimulates outside-the-box thinking that has given us the Internet and the stealth bomber. On occasion, however, Darpa goes off half-cocked. Its Total (now Terrorist) Information Awareness plan to combine all commercial credit data and individual bank and academic records with F.B.I. and C.I.A. dossiers, which would have made every American's life an open book has been reined in somewhat by Congress after we privacy nuts hollered to high heaven. Comes now LifeLog, the all-remembering cyberdiary. Do you know those hand-held personal digital assistants that remind you of appointments, store phone numbers and birthdays, tip you off to foibles of friends and vulnerabilities of enemies, and keep desperate global executives in unremitting touch day and night? Forget about 'em those wireless whiz-bangs are already yestertech. Darpa's LifeLog initiative is part of its "cognitive computing" research. The goal is to teach your computer to learn by your experience, so that what has been your digital assistant will morph into your lifelong partner in memory. Darpa is sprinkling around $7.3 million in research contracts (a drop in its $2.7 billion budget) to develop PAL, the Perceptive Assistant that Learns. For those who suspect that I am dreaming this up, get that lumbering old machine in your back pocket to access www.darpa.mil/ipto, and then click on "research areas" and then "LifeLog." You are then in a world light-years beyond the Matrix into virtual Graham-land. "To build a cognitive computing system," says proto-PAL, "a user must store, retrieve and understand data about his or her past experiences. This entails collecting diverse data. . . . The research will determine the types of data to collect and when to collect it." This diverse data can include everything you ("the user") see, smell, taste, touch and hear every day of your life. But wouldn't the ubiquitous partner be embarrassing at times? Relax, says the program description, presumably written by Dr. Doug Gage, who didn't answer my calls, e-mails or frantic telepathy. "The goal of the data collection is to `see what I see' rather than to `see me.' Users are in complete control of their own data-collection efforts, decide when to turn the sensors on or off and decide who will share the data." That's just dandy for the personal privacy of the "user," who would be led to believe he controlled the only copy of his infinitely detailed profile. But what about the "use-ee" the person that PAL's user is looking at, listening to, sniffing or conspiring with to blow up the world? The human user may have opt-in control of the wireless wire he is secretly wearing, but all the people who come in contact with PAL and its willing user-spy would be ill-used without their knowledge. Result: Everybody would be snooping on everybody else, taping and sharing that data with the government and the last media conglomerate left standing. And in the basement of the Pentagon, LifeLog's Dr. Gage and his PAL, the totally aware Admiral Poindexter, would be dumping all this "voluntary" data into a national memory bank, which would have undeniable recall of everything you would just as soon forget. Followers of Ned Ludd, who in 1799 famously destroyed two nefarious machines knitting hosiery, hope that Congress will ask: is the computer our servant or our partner? Are diaries personal, or does the Pentagon have a right to LifeLog? And so, as the diarist Samuel Pepys liked to conclude, to bed.

A Pentagon project to develop a digital super diary that records heartbeats, travel, Internet chats ^× everything a person does ^× also could provide private companies with powerful software to analyze behavior. That has privacy experts worried. Known as LifeLog, the project aims to capture and analyze a multimedia record of everywhere a subject goes and everything he or she sees, hears, reads, says and touches. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has solicited bids and hopes to award four 18-month contracts beginning this summer. <snip> "Because you collected it voluntarily, the government can get it with a search warrant," he said. "And an increasing amount of personal data is also available from third parties. The government can get data from them simply by asking or signing a subpoena." He notes that traffic and security cameras and automated tollbooth pass records are already used by police to trace a person's path. Dempsey questions how LifeLog's analytical software, in the hands of other government agencies or the private sector, will interpret such data and how Americans will be protected from errors. "You can go to the airport to pick up a friend, to claim lost luggage or to case it for a terrorist attack. What story will LifeLog write from this data?" he asked. "At the very least, you ought to know when someone is using it and have the right to correct the 'story' it writes." <snip> Pentagon contracting documents give a sense of the project's scope. Cameras and microphones would capture what the user sees or hears; sensors would record what he or she feels. Global positioning satellite sensors would log every movement. Biomedical sensors would monitor vital signs. E-mails, instant messages, Web-based transactions, telephone calls and voicemails would be stored. Mail and faxes would be scanned. Links to every radio and television broadcast heard and every newspaper, magazine, book, Web site or database seen would be recorded. Breakthrough software would automatically produce an electronic diary that organizes the data into "episodes" of the user's life, such as "I took the 08:30 a.m. flight from Washington's Reagan National Airport to Boston's Logan Airport," according to the documents. Walker said DARPA has no plans to develop software to analyze multiple LifeLogs. But DARPA advised contractors that ultimately, with proper anonymity, data from many LifeLogs could facilitate "early detection of an emerging epidemic." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6164-2003Jun3.html?referrer=emailarticle

By Matthew Fordahl ASSOCIATED PRESS No one disputes that Michelle Zimmermann lost control of her 2002 GMC Yukon as she drove on a two-lane highway in Massachusetts one snowy afternoon last January. Her friend died after the sport utility vehicle slammed into a tree. Miss Zimmermann said she was driving within the posted 40 mph speed limit, but like millions of other Americans the 33-year-old didn't know that her vehicle had a "black box." Monitoring her driving, it recorded the last few seconds before the crash. Bolstered by data they say indicates Miss Zimmermann was driving well above the speed limit, prosecutors have charged the Beverly, Mass., woman with negligent vehicular homicide. She has pleaded not guilty and faces up to 2 years in jail if convicted. An estimated 25 million automobiles in the United States now have event data recorders, a scaled-down version of the devices that monitor cockpit activity in airplanes. Like aviation recorders, automobile black boxes mainly receive attention after an accident. The devices' primary function is to monitor various sensors and decide whether to fire air bags. Since the 1998 model year, all new cars from all manufacturers have been required to have air bags and so most such recent-model cars have the devices. But secondary and more recently installed features in many recorders store data from a few seconds before a crash. Though capabilities vary widely among carmakers, most recorders store only limited information on speed, seat-belt use, physical forces, brakes and other factors. Voices are not recorded. But the devices are finding its way into courtrooms as evidence in criminal and civil cases, leading some privacy advocates to question how the recorders came to be installed so widely with so little public notice or debate. http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Central/08/19/janklow.accident.ap/index.html