Two-Way Street of Total Information Awareness

In January 2008, Pulitzer Prize-winner Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker an in-depth article about the U.S. intelligence community focusing on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the necessity for interagency communications — something that Total Information Awareness (TIA) was meant to facilitate. Wright observed that “the fantasy worlds that Disney creates have a surprising amount in common with the ideal universe envisaged by the intelligence community, in which environments are carefully controlled and people are closely observed, and no one seems to mind” (1).