John Sandford's The Hanged Man's Song ( think Total Information Awareness

[wakeme2008]

From Amazon's writeup

This series of techno-suspense novels featuring artist, computer wizard and professional criminal Kidd (The Fool's Run; The Empress File; The Devil's Code) and his sometime girlfriend, cat-burglar LuEllen, are far fewer in number and less well-known than Sandford's bestselling Prey books. In this entry, Bobby, Kidd's genius hacker friend ("Bobby is the deus ex machina for the hacking community, the fount of all knowledge, the keeper of secrets, the source of critical phone numbers, a guide through the darkness of IBM mainframes"), goes offline.....

Back in the late 80s John Sandford started the Kidd series with first two books of the series. Sandford went on to write his better know Prey series. Around 2000, John went back to continue writing his Kidd series. The fifteen plus years between the first Kidd book and the third Kidd book is interesting from the computer worlds of their times. The first book has Kidd dealing with PC with ONLY floppies. By the second book Hard Drives where added to the PCs of the day. Fast forward to the third book and we an in the World of today with the Internet and WiFi... :) As a side note Kidd "games" the Tarot Cards and for that reason one card is part of the name of each book.

I got audiobooks of the four books all at one time and just finished the four novels. For mystery/suspense lovers I would recommend reading then all in sequence.

Ok the Political side of the newest book. :scared:

From Cato Site http://www.cato.org/dailys/01-20-03.html

John Poindexter, head of the Pentagon's Office of Information Awareness, is developing a vast surveillance database to track terror suspects. The Total Information Awareness (TIA) system will, according to Poindexter, "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing OIA access to citizens' credit card purchases, travel itineraries, telephone calling records, email, medical histories and financial information. It would give government the power to generate a comprehensive data profile on any U.S. citizen

The theory being is IF you collect all this information you may be able to "connect the dots" and discover terrorist unknown to you today. That's the Theory.

I have been in the programming business since the 60s and find Sandford's knowledge very strong. OK without giving out all the details of the book, Sandford lays out a very different use for TIA. If you believe the powers behind TIA, they want all this data so they can mine it looking for say people booking one way flights, paying in cash and all from the same area of the World. Once they got this information, they would cross check all their databases to see if any of these people know each other.... That's the theory. Sandford's theory of the use of these TIA databases is just the opposite and for controlling people of power.

In Sandford's world, the people behind TIA are targeting members of Congress and more so the members of the ruling party. Top committee chairpersons are very very powerful people. Sandford has the TIA people starting with a name and data mining their databases for all knowledge and connections to that person. This is not from the book just an example What IF, you had a say 14 yo boy flying all over the country and always showing up in a town at the exact same time Senator McKain is in that town alone without his wife... MMMMM,,, Oh look here, the boy's airfare was paid by a credit card that could be linked back to the Senator... Oh lookie here the boy never checks into a hotel ... You get the idea. Then say the powers to be need Senator McKain to flip-flop on say allowing people to be tortured. Just showing him some pictures of a nice 14 yo boy may get him to change his mind on torture.

Once you create these databases, the mining of data could be done starting with general items going in OR one item going out. Very Very troubling.