Just finished reading an entertaining & frightening New Yorker article by Hendrik Hertzberg about the Information Awareness Office whose mission is to:
imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness.
He talks about Phillip K. Dick, the Ministry of Silly Walks, and sites some of the IAO's goals: one of which is to enable "entity extraction from natural language text". They don't want to read email and instant messages by chance do they? I wonder if they've heard of Perl and the Lingua namespace on CPAN.
John Poindexter...Just Another Perl Hacker?
