I’m writing this in mid-May, the day after the Pentagon announced that it was changing the name of its “Total Information Awar

So Tell Me What You Really Think

Shirley Duglin Kennedy

I’m writing this in mid-May, right after the Pentagon announced it was changing the name of its “Total Information Awareness” program to “Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA).”

"This name created in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens," said the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) in its report to the U.S. Congress. "That is not [the Defense Department's] intent in pursuing this program."

I, for one, will begin sleeping better immediately. An article in Federal Computer Week (http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003/0519/web-darpa-05-20-03.asp) said, “To continue to assess the privacy concerns, DOD (Department of Defense) has created an oversight board of senior department and intelligence community representatives, chaired by the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. The Defense secretary also will receive advice on legal and policy issues….”

A DARPA program manager said, in an InformationWeek article

(http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10000184), that the system prototype "won't scan 'irrelevant' personal information about Americans, such as medical records," but it may look at over-the-counter drug purchases, "which could indicate planning of a bioterrorist attack." (Say what? “Sir! Please drop that bottle of Advil® and step away slowly.”) Meanwhile, tests of the system so far have produced "a large number of false positives." Hoo boy.

Now, I’m sure all of these people have our best interests as private citizens at heart, but you still may want to err on the side of caution and think twice before renting movies about airplanes during the same week you buy pita bread and or spend much time browsing the Al-Jazeera website.

Find the full text of the report at: http://www.darpa.mil/body/tia/TIA%20DI.pdf. If you can’t handle the whole thing, read the highlights here: http://www.darpa.mil/body/tia/TIA%20ES.pdf. Or give this FAQ a try: http://www.darpa.mil/body/tia/terrorism_info_aware.htm.

Here’s an analysis by the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19272-2003May21.html) that includes a round-up of opinions from other media sources.

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A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=90), reported a 50% increase in high speed Internet adoption at home from March 2002 to March 2003. However, the study also suggests “growth may be moderating.”

As of the end of March 2003, 31% of U.S. households had a broadband connection. The Pew study informs us that in countries like Canada and South Korea, “half of all households have high-speed connections.” We may never get there. Why?

Some 12% of the survey respondents said broadband was not available where they lived -- mainly in rural areas. An additional 17% said they didn’t know whether they could get broadband service or not, which indicates a certain lack of enthusiasm. And nearly three out of five people who currently access the Internet via dial-up said they were just plain not interested in a broadband connection.

Incidentally, the majority of home broadband users (67%) surveyed said they connected via cable modem, with 28% using DSL. (The remainder apparently connect via wireless, fiber optic cable or other technologies.) One USB Warburg analyst told Reuters in May that he expected cable to maintain its market share lead, although the gap may narrow a bit because some of the larger telcos are cutting the cost of DSL in order to woo subscribers.

Coincidentally, a recent survey by AeA (http://www.aeanet.org/) – which bills itself as “the nation's largest high-tech trade association – also discovered that broadband growth is slowing, and for business users as well as those at home. William Archey, president of AeA (formerly the American Electronics Association), told the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23117-2003May21.html) that access and cost were the two main factors holding back further broadband adoption.

This is not rocket science. Basically, everyone who wants broadband and can get it/afford it already has it, although there are some folks in rural areas who are desperate for it but can’t get it. Most dial-up users don’t feel that it’s worth paying a premium for more speed. Perhaps if prices came down…

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Meanwhile, a few of the larger Internet service providers (ISPs) are rolling out “premium” services that promise broadband speed over a regular dial-up connection. In theory, this would be ideal for the rural user who can’t get cable or DSL, and for anyone who doesn’t want to ante up $50 a month for gen-yoo-wine broadband. But does it actually work?

PC Magazine gave two of these services a trial run (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1090228,00.asp) and found that they delivered pretty much what they promise. Neither service physically speeds up a typical 56K dial-up modem connection. Both employ a combination of caching and compression technologies to deliver Internet content to your computer more rapidly. Users of both services -- EarthLink Plus (http://www.earthlink.net/home/dial/plus/) and NetZero HiSpeed (http://www.netzero.net/signup/faqs-accel.html) – can trade off image quality for more speed, or vice versa. PC Magazine warns, “If you choose the highest speed (and hence the greatest compression), the image quality is downright poor.”

EarthLink Plus is the more expensive of the two services ($28.95 per month, in late May) but provides eight extra e-mail addresses and 10MB server space for personal Web pages. NetZero, at $14.95 a month, may be a good value for those who don’t need the extras.

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If you were without e-mail or phone service for five days, which would

cause the greatest difficulty? Of almost 400 respondents in an e-mail

versus phone survey by the Meta Group in late April, 74 percent said

that not having access to e-mail would be a greater problem. Two main reasons cited for preferring e-mail: the ability to communicate with "multiple parties" easily, including overseas customers/partners; and the fact that e-mail creates a paper trail. Oh, by the way, those surveyed were all “business-technology professionals,” so this is not your average slice of the population.

Nevertheless, when the Pew Internet and American Life Project – man, those folks are just relentless – surveyed a broader population last December (http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=79), 52% of the respondents rated e-mail as being “essential to their work,” with an additional 34% rating it as moderately important.

Note, however, that 85% of these folks said they preferred actual “conversations” when dealing with sensitive issues and/or touchy workplace situations. Alas, some companies have actually used e-mail to inform employees of layoffs (http://www.usatoday.com/money/tech/2001-02-20-bad-news.htm). And one Australian man, fired via cell phone text message, sued his former employer in May (http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6465814%255E1702,00.html). Said his attorney, "The lack of procedural fairness culminated in the undignified process of being terminated via an SMS (short message service) message." When did things get this ugly?

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Shirl Kennedy is on the move again. By the time you read this column, she will be working as the reference librarian at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.