The age of massive data aggregation has arrived, and with it comes a convergence of corporate power and government surveillance that threatens to blur the line between security and totalitarian control. Defense contractors, advertising firms, social media platforms, and technology giants are forging partnerships with federal agencies to build comprehensive digital profiles on every citizen.
Federal Government Pours Hundreds of Millions Into Big Data Programs
This sweeping data integration effort spans the largest federal departments, guided by a White House Office of Science and Technology framework that committed $200 million in initial funding. An additional $250 million per year was earmarked by military branches for advancing human-computer interaction capabilities.
The Obama administration distributed the $200 million across the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, U.S. Geological Survey, and DARPA. The explicit goal was accelerating the pipeline that transforms raw data into actionable decisions.
Minority Report Software Enters the Commercial Market
The commercial potential of this data revolution attracted Oblong Industries, the company that developed the gestural computing interface featured in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Their proprietary system, called g-speak, was adapted into a commercial product available to enterprise customers. While media coverage emphasized that predictive crime-detection capabilities had been stripped from the commercial version, that reassurance warranted closer scrutiny given the broader trajectory of government surveillance programs.
Oblong openly acknowledged that customers could layer their own analytical tools on top of the base platform, meaning law enforcement and intelligence agencies could theoretically reconstruct the very predictive capabilities that were supposedly removed.
NSA Data Center and FBI Facial Recognition Expanded Surveillance Reach
The infrastructure supporting these ambitions was growing rapidly. The NSA was constructing a massive $2 billion facility designed to intercept, decode, analyze, and warehouse enormous volumes of global communications, from satellite transmissions to undersea cable traffic. The center’s databases would ultimately hold private emails, mobile phone conversations, internet search histories, and countless mundane records like parking receipts and travel bookings, effectively realizing the Total Information Awareness concept first proposed during the Bush administration’s first term.
Simultaneously, the FBI was advancing its Next Generation Identification facial recognition program. Working with states including Michigan, Hawaii, Maryland, and potentially Oregon since late 2011, the bureau projected its searchable facial image database would contain a minimum of 12 million photographs by the time of full deployment in 2014.
Defense Industry Ties Raised Troubling Questions About Oblong’s Future
Although Oblong stated it had no direct government contracts at the time, its client roster told a different story about where the technology was heading. Among its customers were Boeing, the world’s second-largest defense contractor and a major drone manufacturer, and General Electric, which specialized in electronic warfare systems and military communications. Together, those two firms generated more than $35 billion in annual revenue, providing enormous capacity to adopt and spread new surveillance technologies.
Oblong’s own marketing materials listed military and intelligence applications alongside financial services, data mining, logistics, network operations, and bioinformatics among its target sectors. The company’s chief executive, Kwin Kramer, stated plainly that law enforcement and intelligence agencies represented major potential customers and that Oblong’s technology led the field.
MIT Origins Connected the Technology to Intelligence Community Roots
The g-speak platform itself had been developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over three decades of research. MIT maintained a well-documented relationship with the intelligence community dating back to 1950, when the CIA helped establish the MIT Center for International Studies.
The convergence of unlimited data collection, sophisticated management tools drawn from science fiction, and deep ties between academia, defense contractors, and intelligence agencies pointed toward a surveillance infrastructure that could outpace any existing legal or ethical framework designed to restrain it.
Originally published August 14, 2012. Content adapted from reporting by Activist Post.
