Politics: I See You

Bubbling up through the defense industry's most evil cauldron of ideas is Lifelog, which has finally broken onto newswires after being the exclusive property of the wonderful yardsticks of militaria at DefenseTech for weeks. This crazy product, profiled here and first spotted by yours truly here and from Tyler over at Demagogue, allows whoever installs your LifeLog to monitor every experience, sensation, sound and image you process in a day. The information is catalogued into a computer network, where they can scan and read your electronic diary to their heart's content.

Wondering what the military application is? Me, too. So does John Pike from Globalsecurity.org:

"I have a much easier time understanding how Big Brother would want this than how (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld would use it," Pike said. "They have not identified a military application."

James X. Dempsey from the Center for Democracy and Technology asks what kind of control users will have, and finds an ominous answer:

"You can go to the airport to pick up a friend, to claim lost luggage or to case it for a terrorist attack. What story will LifeLog write from this data?" he asked. "At the very least, you ought to know when someone is using it and have the right to correct the `story' it writes."

Great. Now we're going to have to launch a campaign to keep DARPA out of our heads, literally.