November 9, 2002
>
> INTELLIGENCE
> Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of
> Americans
>
> By JOHN MARKOFF
>
> The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast
> electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the
> hunt for terrorists around the globe - including the United States.
>
> As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has
> described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will
> provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant
> access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit
> card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search
> warrant.
>
> Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted
> to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But
> Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan
> administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to
> process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in
> the United States.
>
> Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and
> speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government
> needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and
> government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to
> hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.
>
> "We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find
> new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate
> information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge,
> and create actionable options," he said in a speech in California
> earlier this year.
>
> Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take
> charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced
> Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for
> developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11
> attacks.
>
> In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness,
> new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the
> Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before
> Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which
> was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private
> information.
>
> The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let
> intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil
> liberties proponents.
>
> "This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," said
> Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in
> Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is
> Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national
> surveillance of the American public."
>
> Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been briefed on the project
> by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a lunch to discuss it, according
> to a Pentagon spokesman.
>
> "As part of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a
> variety of organizations, to include the law enforcement community," a
> Pentagon spokeswoman said.
>
> An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be
> identified, said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the
> Pentagon about the project but that no final decision had been made
> about what information the F.B.I. might add to the system.
>
> A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, Gordon
> Johndroe, said officials in the office were not familiar with the
> computer project and he declined to discuss concerns raised by the
> project's critics without knowing more about it.
>
> He referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials
> said they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too
> were not familiar enough with the project.
>
> Some members of a panel of computer scientists and policy experts who
> were asked by the Pentagon to review the privacy implications this
> summer said terrorists might find ways to avoid detection and that the
> system might be easily abused.
>
> "A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the
> potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this
> administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer
> scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing
> Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."
>
> Other technology policy experts dispute that assessment and support
> Admiral Poindexter's position that linking of databases is necessary to
> track potential enemies operating inside the United States.
>
> "They're conceptualizing the problem in the way we've suggested it needs
> to be understood," said Philip Zelikow, a historian who is executive
> director of the Markle Foundation task force on National Security in the
> Information Age. "They have a pretty good vision of the need to make the
> tradeoffs in favor of more sharing and openness."
>
> On Wednesday morning, the panel reported its findings to Dr. Tony
> Tether, the director of the defense research agency, urging development
> of technologies to protect privacy as well as surveillance, according to
> several people who attended the meeting.
>
> If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly
> bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would
> soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.
>
> The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern recognition
> techniques known as "data mining," a set of statistical techniques used
> by scientists as well as by marketers searching for potential customers.
>
> The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and
> view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and
> groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently,
> all from their individual computers.
>
> The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test data
> that would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at
> Fort Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system would be put
> into operation.
>
> The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the
> government to lash together both commercial and government data to hunt
> for patterns of terrorist activities.
>
> "What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to
> revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and
> identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby
> enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and
> defeat terrorist acts," said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense
> research agency.
>
> Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was
> convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as
> a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral
> Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court
> because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress
> about the case.
>
> Copyright The New York Times Company
> |
