Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’

From The New York Times.com (Oct. 10):

More than 60 years ago, in his “Foundation” series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science — psychohistory — that combined mathematics and psychology to predict the future.

Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cell phones — to do the same thing.

The most optimistic researchers believe that these storehouses of “big data” will for the first time reveal sociological laws of human behavior — enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability, just as physicists and chemists can predict natural phenomena. [read more]

Is this shades of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program that was in the Bush administration (also part of the “Person of Interest” TV show)? It seems this ‘Data Eye in the Sky’ is doing much much more.  The TIA program only scanned for potential terrorist attacks. This program looks for not just political upheaval but for pandemics too (which isn’t a bad thing to track). I don’t know if it will uncover sociological laws of human behavior or not.  But whatever it finds will probably be part of some gov’t policy even if the laws are correct or not. Washington will use the “laws” this program will find to justify any legislation they create.