Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [32]
We were excited after the stimulating brainstorming session around our conference table, and the project seemed to be building momentum. Was the U.S. Department of Defense, one of the world’s largest organizations, going to be leading the way to the age of Total Recall? We didn’t realize that LifeLog was headed into the middle of a political minefield.
In June 2003, William Safire wrote a column for The New York Times about LifeLog that put the fear of Big Brother into the reader’s heart:
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.
Although Safire seemed to finish the piece with tongue in cheek, invoking “Ned Ludd, who in 1799 famously destroyed two nefarious machines knitting hosiery,” the powerful image of Admiral Poindexter (a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal) in the basement spying on the population was enough to send the political class into hysterics.
Poindexter had also been the face man for another DARPA initiative called TIA, for Total Information Awareness, which was unveiled in the months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The aim of TIA was to create a centralized überdatabase incorporating every electronic record, transaction, communication, file, and footprint the government could lay its hands on about every person and organization in the nation. They would then sift through this megadossier with data-mining software in search of patterns that could identify terrorist plottings.
Safire had blown the whistle on TIA as well, in an earlier column from November 2002. There was enough public outcry over the possible abuses of TIA for it be officially scrapped a few months later.
The stink over LifeLog seemed to rest on the fear-driven belief that it amounted to the same thing as TIA. But there was nothing about LifeLog that would have required people to entrust all their personal data to a central server farm in the bowels of the National Security Agency. There was nothing about LifeLog that even implied people would be required to do lifelogging at all. This effort was aimed at helping the individual soldier or officer in a state of information overload.
I keep my nose out of partisan politics. I guess that made me naïve enough to imagine someone would just explain the truth of the situation (Safire hadn’t even spoken to anyone at DARPA) and sort things out. Instead, LifeLog was canceled. If I had cared more about politics, I might have been outraged and suspicious that a lot of political decisions were made based on juicy headlines rather than common sense. In any event, I knew not to waste my outrage on this, because I understood a little trick of technopolitics: Ideas that run into trouble, especially good ones, are often officially dropped only to be resurrected, recycled, and rebranded until they gain acceptance. Technology does not give up or give in.
So LifeLog is dead; long live ASSIST! DARPA created the Advanced Soldier Sensor Information Systems Technology (ASSIST), carefully explaining how it would help just soldiers. No one brought up Admiral Poindexter this time, and the program went ahead.
A great example of the fine work done under the ASSIST umbrella comes from the contextual computing group at Georgia Tech, led by Thad Storter. They have shown the kind of ASSIST daily impact could have for a soldier on patrol:
A platoon goes on a presence patrol in Iraq. Their goal is to be visible to provide a sense of security for Iraqi civilians, encourage goodwill, and look for signs of insurgents. Upon returning from their five-hour patrol, the platoon leader is debriefed by