Pentagon Readies Massive Spying System
By Michael J. Sniffen
The Guardian Unlimited
Tuesday 20 May 2003
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon assured Congress that its planned anti-terror surveillance
system will only analyze legally acquired information and changed the name of the project to help
allay privacy concerns that prompted congressional restrictions.
The Total Information Awareness program now under development by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, will henceforth be named the Terrorism Information
Awareness program.
In report ordered by Congress 90 days ago, DARPA said the old name ``created in some minds
the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens. That is
not DoD's (Department of Defense's) intent in pursuing this program.''
Rather the goal is ``to protect U.S. citizens by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats
before an attack'' and the new name was chosen ``to make this objective absolutely clear.''
While the name changed, the description of the program being developed remained essentially
the same. DARPA did, however, emphasize that it has let contracts to enhance privacy and
security protections for personal data analyzed by U.S. agents who might ultimately use the
software tools that are being tested or are under development.
During research and testing, DARPA is ``only using data and information that is either foreign
intelligence and counter intelligence information legally obtained and usable by the federal
government or wholly synthetic (artificial) data that has been generated, for research purposes
only, to resemble ... real-world patterns of behavior.''
Looking ahead to the possible implementation of the system by various U.S. counter intelligence
agencies and policy-makers, DARPA did not propose any changes in the laws regulating
government access to databases full of information about private commercial transactions, like
airplane ticket purchases or apartment rentals.
But DARPA noted that some current laws governing some categories of private information ``may
well constrain or ... completely preclude deployment of TIA search tools with respect to some
data.'' The agency did not specify which data-mining software tools or private databases would fall
into this forbidden category.
DARPA has acknowledged that it is developing software data-mining tools capable of giving 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 search for patterns of behavior that betray an
imminent terrorist attack.
This prospect has alarmed privacy advocates on both ends of the political spectrum. In February,
Congress barred use the TIA system against American citizens pending further congressional
review. It also ordered the report that DARPA delivered 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 protects 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.
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