On 19 March 2007, Channel NewsAsia ran the story of Singapore setting up a centre to pre-empt possible security threats to the nation – a system to ‘discern patterns in a complex and chaotic environment’ so that proper measures or countermeasures can be developed to circumvent them.
Dubbed RAHS, or Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning, it is a system that will help planners, policymakers and decision makers to plan for the future by being able to sift through massive volumes of information and data far more efficiently than human analysts.
However, according to Wired News, the RAHS is ‘an even more ambitious incarnation of the Pentagon’s controversial Total Information Awareness (TIA) program — an effort to collect and mine data across all government agencies in the hopes of pinpointing threats to national security’.
The Information Awareness Office (IAO), which was in charge of developing the TIA program, was defunded in 2003 following public criticism that it could lead to a Big Brother-esque massive surveillance system. (Wikipedia 2007)
This leads us to consider of the implications that can arise due to the implementation of RAHS in Singapore. It is entirely possible that the RAHS can be used in the same manner to surveil the staggering amounts of data being transferred across the Internet. Local bloggers have been charged with sedition for racist comments posted in supposed anonymity on online forums and blogs, and now with a system that can easily mine data, perhaps we must reconsider the notion of the Internet being an alternative media for political discourse or dissent.
