You may have noticed that I've not been very happy about the DARPA funded Information Awareness Office. I just get scared when I hear about how these guys want to tie together all this data, and then hope that only the right people have access to it.
But this month's Technology Review from MIT has a really good article entitled Can Sensemaking Keep Us Safe, about the state of the art in systems that are designed to find patterns in data, and how to pull disparate (and currently isolated) data sources together. The computer programmer in me found the article really fascinating, but the citizen in me found it disturbing. All in all it's a great view from 1000 feet on the what's going on in this area.
