John Adams. Adam’s Apple. In the US the Adams name is as American as apple pie.
Good thing then that a new DARPA project has the same name!
DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Project Administration) recently announced that it would be funding a project known as ADAMS (Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales). According the Homeland Security Newswire, “Researchers in a 2-year, $9 million project will create a suite of algorithms that can detect multiple types of insider threats by analyzing massive amounts of data — including email, text messages and file transfers — for unusual activity.”
That sounds a lot like the old Total Information Awareness program, a controversial data analysis program shelved by DARPA at Congressional insistence in 2004.
ADAMS seems like a new form government data mining, that may also be subject to Congressional scrutiny. To learn more about data mining, visit “The Data Minefield,” Medill’s web-based resource bank for journalists and citizens who want a practical understanding of the issues.
