[Jeff White]

For some reason I thought Congress had killed funding for this....



Informationweek.com
April 10, 2003

Total Information Awareness Project Undergoes First Test

A key technologist on the project says Americans must be prepared to trade some privacy for security.

By Aaron Ricadela, InformationWeek

Pentagon researchers this month completed the first set of test data for the controversial Total Information Awareness system, a key technologist for the project says.

Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), said at an IBM-sponsored conference on data privacy in Almaden, Calif., this week that Americans must trade some privacy for security. "Three thousand people died on 9/11. When you consider the potential effect of a terrorist attack against the privacy of an entire population, there has to be some trade-off," Dyer says.

Total Information Awareness, an experimental computer system being developed by Darpa under Vice Adm. John Poindexter, seeks to scan information about passport, visa, and work-permit applications, plus information about purchases of airline tickets, hotel rooms, over-the-counter drugs, and chemicals--both here and abroad--to discern "signature" patterns of terrorist behavior. Congressional leaders have criticized the system's potential to spy on Americans and agreed to restrict further research and development without consulting Congress.

Signals of potential terrorist activity are likely to be weak amid a field of data "noise," Dyer says. TIA is designed to seek patterns that could indicate terrorist behavior while preserving people's anonymity, he adds. "We're testing our hypothesis on nothing but synthetic data."

Total Information Awareness, the keystone project of Darpa's Information Awareness Office, incorporates language-translation, data-searching and pattern-recognition, and decision-support technologies, according to the project's Web site. According to Dyer, the system won't scan "irrelevant" personal information about Americans, such as medical records, but could consider records of over-the-counter drug purchases, which could indicate planning of a bioterrorist attack.

Dyer says the initial experiment data set, completed this month, could also consider relationships between purchases of certain chemicals, whether the buyer or a family member was involved in an activity such as farming that could explain a benign reason for the purchase, and where the purchase was made.

[LawDog]

this week that Americans must trade some privacy for security.

BITE ME, HAIRBALL!

That is it. We need to start a movement to add an Amendment to the Constitution stating that Americans have the right to privacy.

LawDog

[Marko Kloos]

Funny, I thought we had that already. History leads me to believe that a new amendment would be treated with much the same reverence as they treat the existing one:

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

[Tamara]

A key technologist on the project says Americans must be prepared to trade some privacy for security.

My actual thoughts on this statement are unprintable. :cuss:

[Jeff White]

There is already a precedent for a right to privacy. I hate to bring this up here, and I only will in the context of discussing the TIA program, but the Supreme Court Decision that legalized abortion didn't actually legalize abortion, but found that the government looking into what happened to a pregnancy violated constitional guarantees of privacy.

So I think we've already established a right to privacy. Privacy is privacy? Right?

Jeff

[Oleg Volk]

An aside:

This thread is why I am a lot less paranoid these days. Back in the USSR, uniforms meant bad news. In America, we have law enforcement officers concerned about the loss of rights for all and actually bother to bring up that subject. From where I sit, that is extremely encouraging. I think this is yet another bit of evidence that we live in a unique country.

Unfortunately, the gollums who came up with the TIA also show that we still have plenty of domestic enemies...

[Waitone]

First question. How come this program is lodged in the DoD? Because DoD has a bigger slush fund. We're talking domestic survellience here. Why not the FIB? or NSA since they do both?
You're right congress did suspend spending for new authorizations. Existing funding remains.

The program will be killed when those who are outraged will use a corn cob and kerosene on elected officials.

Second point. TIA is a really partially kestered name for government intrusion into private lives.

I suggest changing the name of TIA to American State Terrorism and Security Initiative (American STASI for short).

I'd suggest applying corn cobs and kerosene to members of the house since the senate is controlled by Orin Hatch, a spinelessrepublican if ever there was one.

[Justin Moore]

In America, we have law enforcement officers concerned about the loss of rights for all and actually bother to bring up that subject. From where I sit, that is extremely encouraging. I think this is yet another bit of evidence that we live in a unique country.

Kudos to Jeff and LawDog!

[Jeff White]

No matter what Congress says it's doing, until it forbids any money to be spent on this, it won't go away.

Jeff

New York Times on the Web
May 20, 2003

Pentagon Spy System To Aim For Terrorists

WASHINGTON (AP) -- To thwart terrorists, the Pentagon is developing a computer surveillance system that would give U.S. agents fingertip access to government and commercial records from around the world that could fill the Library of Congress more than 50 times.

The library's collection of more than 18 million books would be dwarfed by the size of the computerized files the government wants to mine for clues that terrorists are planning attacks.

The prospect of what the Pentagon calls the Total Information Awareness system has alarmed privacy advocates on both ends of the political spectrum. In February, Congress barred use of the still-to-be-developed system against American citizens and ordered a full description of the plans developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. That report was to be delivered to Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

Also Tuesday, the Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that advocates online privacy, was giving a House Judiciary subcommittee a report that concluded, ``There are few legal constraints on government access to commercial databases.'' Neither the Privacy Act nor the Constitution protect consumer data held by private companies, and other laws ``are riddled with exceptions for law enforcement or intelligence uses.''

The center's executive director, Jim Dempsey, said in prepared testimony, ``Since 9/11, the FBI is authorized by the attorney general to go looking for information about individuals with no reason to believe they are engaged in, or planning, or connected to any wrongdoing.''

In advice to would-be TIA contractors, DARPA disclosed that the project will require ``gathering a much broader array of data than we do currently'' and break down barriers that keep separate data already collected by a host of agencies.

``The amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes,'' the agency instructions said. A byte amounts to the electronic representation of one letter of the alphabet, and a petabyte is a quadrillion -- 1,000,000,000,000,000 -- bytes.

DARPA, which developed the Internet, is again trying to expand the boundaries of existing technology. Among the largest databases on the Internet is an archive of the last five years of Web pages; it consumes 100 terabytes, or one-tenth of a petabyte.

Despite privacy fears, government documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that scores of major defense contractors and prominent universities applied last year for the first research contracts to design the surveillance and analysis system.

Conceived and managed by retired Adm. John Poindexter, the TIA surveillance system is based on his theory that ``terrorists must engage in certain transactions to coordinate and conduct attacks against Americans, and these transactions form patterns that may be detectable.''

DARPA said the goal is to predict terrorist actions by analyzing such transactions as passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, car rentals, airline ticket purchases, arrests or reports of suspicious activities.

Other databases DARPA wants to make available to U.S. agents include financial, education, medical and housing records and biometric identification databases based on fingerprints, irises, facial shapes and gait.

TIA is developing breakthrough software ``for treating these databases as a virtual, centralized grand database'' capable of being quickly mined by counterintelligence officers even though the data will be held in many places, many languages and many formats, DARPA documents say.

Poindexter's project would integrate some projects DARPA has been working on for several years, including an effort to develop a radar-based device that could identify people by the way they walk.

Operating on the theory that an individual's walk is as unique as a signature, DARPA-financed researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been 80 to 95 percent successful in identifying people. If DARPA orders a prototype, the individual ``gait signatures'' of people could become part of the data accessed by TIA.

At a cost of less than $1 million over the past three years, researchers headed by Gene Greneker have been aiming a 1-foot-square radar dish at 100 test volunteers to record how they walk. Elsewhere at Georgia Tech, DARPA is financing other researchers who use video cameras and computers to try to develop distinctive gait signatures.

``One of the nice things about radar is we see through bad weather, darkness, even a heavy robe shrouding the legs, and video cameras can't,'' Greneker said in an interview. ``At 600 feet we can do quite well.''

The target doesn't have to be doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk to be distinctive, because the radar detects small frequency shifts in the reflected signal off legs, arms and the torso as they move in a combination of different speeds and directions.

The system could be used by embassy security officers to conclude that a shadowy figure observed a few hundred feet away at night or in heavy clothing on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday was the same person and should be investigated further to see if he was casing the building for an attack, Greneker said.

At a restricted facility, the technology could warn security officers that an approaching person was probably not an employee by comparing his gait with those on file. ``And we now know how to detect people who are carrying heavy packages, which could include a 25-pound bomb in a backpack,'' Greneker said.

DARPA contracting records made available through a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group, show Poindexter agreed to pay for 26 research projects and rejected 154 others through last Dec. 4. Other DARPA contract award data were released under FOIA to the Center for Public Integrity, an ethics advocacy group.

[Jeff White]

Dallas Morning News
May 20, 2003

Terrorism Fight Takes New Steps

Pentagon developing radar device to ID people by way they walk

By Associated Press

WASHINGTON – A radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk is being developed by the Pentagon for use in a new anti-terrorist surveillance system.

Operating on the theory that an individual's walk is as unique as a signature, the Pentagon has financed a Georgia Institute of Technology research project that has been 80 percent to 95 percent successful in identifying people.

If the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency orders a prototype, the individual "gait signatures" of people could become part of the data to be linked in a vast surveillance system the Pentagon agency calls Total Information Awareness.

That system has raised privacy alarms on both ends of the political spectrum. In February, Congress barred its use against American citizens without further congressional review.

Conceived and managed by retired Adm. John Poindexter, the surveillance system is based on his theory that "terrorists must engage in certain transactions to coordinate and conduct attacks against Americans, and these transactions form patterns that may be detectable."

Adm. Poindexter's plan would integrate some projects the defense agency has been working on for several years, including research headed by Gene Greneker at Georgia Tech.

At a cost of less than $1 million over three years, he has been aiming a 1-foot-square radar dish at 100 test volunteers to record how they walk. Elsewhere at Georgia Tech, the defense agency is funding other research that uses video cameras and computers to try to develop distinctive gait signatures.

"One of the nice things about radar is we see through bad weather, darkness, even a heavy robe shrouding the legs, and video cameras can't. At 600 feet we can do quite well," Mr. Greneker said.

"There's a signature that's somewhat unique to the individual. We've demonstrated proof of this concept."

The system could be used by embassy security officers to conclude that a shadowy figure observed a few hundred feet away at night or in heavy clothing on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday was the same person and should be investigated to see if he was preparing for an attack, Mr. Greneker said.

At a restricted facility, the technology could warn security officers that an approaching person was probably not an employee by comparing his gait with those on file.

"And we now know how to detect people who are carrying heavy packages, which could include a 25-pound bomb in a backpack," Mr. Greneker said.

Mr. Greneker hasn't gotten caught up in the privacy debate.

"We are research and development people," he said. "We think about what's possible, not what the government will do with it."

[dustind]

If only there was a way to kill it, not just cut funding. I always knew someone would find a way to sneak money into it, even if it was offically funded.

What part of "secure in their person against unreasonable search" don't they understand. If it can see into or under my clothing, thats searching...

[Jeff White]

Washington Post
May 21, 2003
Pg. 6

Pentagon Details New Surveillance System

Critics Fear Proposed Extensive Use of Computer Database Raises Privacy Issues

By Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post Staff Writer

The Pentagon yesterday detailed the development of a massive computer surveillance system that would have the power to track people as never before.

It would identify people at great distances by the irises of their eyes, the grooves in their face or even their gait. It would look for suspicious patterns in video footage of people's movements. And it would analyze airline ticket purchases, visa applications, as well as financial, medical, educational and biometric records to try to predict terrorists' acts or catch them in the planning stage.

The technology does not yet exist, and no one knows whether its creation is even possible. Indeed, the very concept of what was originally known as the government's Total Information Awareness initiative raised so many privacy and civil liberties issues that, in February, Congress banned its deployment. Legislators asked for more information about the project and sought an analysis about how citizens' privacy would be balanced with the need for security.

The report that was delivered to legislators yesterday identifies the effort by a new name -- the Terrorist Information Awareness program. It sought to allay concerns about privacy by outlining policies to conduct spot audits of the data being collected and implementing technical safeguards.

"The program's previous name, 'Total Information Awareness' program, created in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens," the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, said in a statement. "DoD's purpose in pursuing these efforts is to protect U.S. citizens by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats before an attack."

DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker said the report is intended to express the agency's "full commitment to planning, executing and overseeing the TIA program in a way that protects privacy and civil liberties."

The core system seeks to create a database of public and private records that could be analyzed for patterns leading up to terrorism. The Pentagon has budgeted $9.2 million for the program in 2003, $20 million in 2004 and $24.5 million in 2005.

"Attempts to 'connect the dots' quickly overwhelm unassisted human abilities," the report stated. "By augmenting human performance using these computer tools, the TIA Program expects to diminish the amount of time humans must spend discovering information and allow humans more time to focus their powerful intellects on things humans do best -- thinking and analysis."

The report outlines technologies and related programs in the surveillance system, including programs to mine data in foreign-language communications and to gauge biological threats by analyzing data from hospitals and other sources.

Other, more speculative systems borrow from prediction techniques used in the corporate world.

One, code-named "FutureMAP," would watch fluctuations in the public markets to assess sentiment on a particular topic, "avoiding surprise and predicting future events." Another, the "Misinformation Detection" system, would analyze language and other aspects of text for false or misleading information. In 2002, the report said, some researchers demonstrated an ability to detect which companies might be the target of Securities and Exchange Commission investigations, based on public filings.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who sponsored the February bill that requires intelligence agencies to get congressional approval before deploying the technology, said the report confirmed his worries that the system may not be the best use of the government's resources because it focuses mostly on theoretical possibilities.

He said new guidelines are needed on how such data should be used. Current privacy laws protect individuals, but they apply only to the private sector. The regulations place few constraints on the government's ability to gain access to material for terrorism investigations.

"I don't take a back seat to anybody in fighting the Mohamed Attas of the world, but before we send people on a virtual goose chase, the country needs to understand what's at stake," Wyden said, referring to one of the terrorists of Sept. 11, 2001. That sentiment was echoed by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who said the report "fails to propose any specific new rules to address the concerns raised by Congress."

Privacy and civil liberties groups were less diplomatic in their criticism. The American Civil Liberties Union called it an "Orwellian program." The Electronic Freedom Forum dubbed it a "giant suspicion-generating machine."

Both groups said the initiative goes against the notion that people are innocent until proven guilty, and expressed worry that people deemed terrorists by computer programs would not have any way of knowing and any way of getting off such a list.

Civil liberties groups have fielded numerous complaints from some people placed on the "watch list" for the Transportation Security Administration because they have names similar to those of known terrorists, and could not stop airlines from detaining and searching them on every flight.

[Jeff White]

New York Times
May 21, 2003

New Name Of Pentagon Data Sweep Focuses On Terror

By Adam Clymer

WASHINGTON, May 20 — Saying they are worried about Americans' privacy, Pentagon officials announced in a report today that they were changing the name of a projected system to mine databases for information to help catch terrorists to Terrorist Information Awareness from Total Information Awareness.

The officials said the name was changed because the earlier version created a false impression that system was being created "for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens."

The report, which Congress demanded 90 days ago as a condition for allowing further research, said the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was complying with all federal privacy laws as it developed the program. The report said the Darpa was not tapping into government or private databases, but was using synthetic or artificial information generated for the program "to resemble and model real-world patterns of behavior."

The Pentagon said it would be up to agencies that would use the program with real information to comply with privacy laws.

Privacy advocates said that was not good enough, because federal laws had huge national security loopholes. Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who pushed through the legislation that required the report and barred using the system without new legislation, said it was insufficient to promise that the system would deal only with "legally collected information."

"Legally collected information," Mr. Wyden said, "includes just about everything. There really isn't much with teeth to protect lawfully collected medical records, travel records, credit records and financial data."

The executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, James X. Dempsey, said: "They basically admit that there are no laws limiting, in any meaningful way, what they can do with data."

The report called the system an effort to "integrate information technologies into a prototype to provide tools to better detect, classify and identify potential foreign terrorists." It includes biometric recognition from faces to styles of walking, known as "gait recognition," or in this report, "human kinematics," and examinations of transactions that may relate to planning terrorist activities.

A list of useful information that the Darpa had on its Web site, darpa.mil, until December included Communications, Country Entry, Critical Resources, Education, Financial, Government, Housing, Medical, Place-Event Entry, Transportation, Travel and Veterinary. A spokeswoman for the agency, Jan Walker, said the relevance of veterinary information was that some biological warfare weapons attacked animals before humans.

The report said, "Safeguarding the privacy and the civil liberties of Americans is a bedrock principle." It added that the Defense Department would make them a "central element" of the Terrorist Information Awareness program.

But Mr. Wyden said, "The name has been changed, but it's very clear that the architects of the original program still want to do the kind of pattern analysis, sweeping examinations of individuals, whether it's how they walk or whatever, that involves law-abiding Americans without the procedural protections a suspect gets."

Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, also rejected the promises of privacy.

"Our current privacy laws," Mr. Feingold said, "are inadequate to deal with new techniques of data mining, which have the ability to access extensive files containing both public and private government records on each and every American. The administration should suspend not only the T.I.A., but all other data-mining initiatives in the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security until Congress can determine whether the promised benefits come at too high a price for our privacy and personal liberties."

Describing how the system is intended to work against terrorism, the report said that teams "would imagine the types of terrorist attacks that might be carried out against the United States at home or abroad."

"They would develop scenarios for these attacks," the report added, "and determine what kind of planning and preparation activities would have to be carried out in order to conduct these attacks."

Then the teams would determine what activities would be needed to carry out the attacks like "the purchase of airline tickets for travel to potential attack sites for reconnaissance purposes, payment for some kind of specialized training or the purchase of materials for a bomb.

"These transactions would form a pattern that may be discernable in certain databases to which the U.S. government would have lawful access."

[Jeff White]

New York Times
May 21, 2003

Experts Say Technology Is Widely Disseminated Inside And Outside Military

By John Markoff

SAN FRANCISCO, May 20 — Congressional efforts to rein in a Pentagon surveillance project may be ineffective because new surveillance technology is being widely disseminated both inside and outside of the military and other less visible federal offices are pursuing similar research, industry executives and computer scientists say.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Awareness Office, overseen by Adm. John M. Poindexter, faced widespread opposition last year to its Total Information Awareness project after reports about the project raised concerns about civil liberties. On Tuesday, the agency delivered a 102-page report to Congress to reassure legislators.

But a related program being pursued by the government's intelligence agencies has drawn no public scrutiny.

The research being conducted for the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency is being financed by a little known federal office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, established during the Clinton administration to provide federal intelligence agencies with basic research capability similar to that of Darpa.

The agency has a budget of about $100 million a year, according to a former government official. Its research covers a wide range of areas from nanotechnology to quantum computing.

The agency is pursuing research in areas like facial recognition as well as basic image recognition technologies, according to computer scientists. In March 2000, for example, the organization reviewed 45 research proposals and made grants to nine organizations including corporations, universities and research centers that are studying various image recognition problems.

ARDA is also financing a program called "Novel Intelligence from Massive Data," which was begun after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The intent of the project is to give intelligence analysts early warning of "strategic surprises" in the same way that the Total Information Awareness system was intended to provide advance information about possible domestic terrorist attacks.

Both the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness project and the ARDA research project seek to detect hidden patterns of activity in vast collections of digital data. The development of these technologies has drawn opposition from civil liberties groups and some technical organizations.

Moreover, several computer scientists question whether such giant data "hoovering" operations, involving either vast databases or software to scan connected databases through a network, can be successful.

They emphasize that once enemies of the United States are aware that digital sentries are hunting for unusual patterns of information, they will simply alter their behavior.

"You won't find terrorists buying C4 explosives with a Mastercard," one computer scientist said.

A spokeswoman for the security agency said in a faxed statement that the Novel Intelligence research had begun in 2001 and that the only data that would be used was open source and that data about analysts would be collected with their consent within strict guidelines. Computer scientists have raised questions about the project's research agenda, because the technologies can easily be disseminated broadly.

"If they were to stick to strictly military-related research and development, there is less of an issue, but these technologies have much broader social implications," said Barbara Simons, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an organization that has expressed concerns about the Pentagon's project.

Information about the project on the organization's Web site (http:ic-arda.org) states that the agency is developing technologies to avoid events like the Sept. 11 attacks and other actions taken by enemies of the United States.

Since the Watergate era, the nation's intelligence agencies have been generally restricted from conducting domestic surveillance. But concerns about terrorism have led the Bush administration to try to break down barriers between various government agencies.

Military analysts said that one of the problems facing Congress was that attempts to limit weapons technologies have frequently left basic research exempt from restrictions in areas like antiballistic missile defense and nuclear weapons design.

"The downside is that basic research creates new pressures," said Christopher Paine, a senior analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization that has an arms control segment. "When the political climate changes, these opportunities loom large."

[Waitone]

Cut to the chase scene.

Total schmotal.

Here is what it really is

American State Terrorism and Security Initiative




American STASI

[Feanaro]

What if I happen to value my freedom more than the safety provided by the government(which is next to nothing?)? :banghead:

[mercedesrules]

(Feanaro)What if I happen to value my freedom more than the safety provided by the government(which is next to nothing?)?
Then, I'm with you 100%.

MR

[Ian]

Yeah, same here. Too bad government doesn't come with an "unsubscribe me from this service" button.