-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [IP] WORTH READING "Total Information Awareness" - secretly funded in defiance of Congress]] Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 14:41:51 -0800 From: Lee Tien To: dave@farber.net References: <43FFBB04.9070108@farber.net> Dave, The problem IMHO is that killed programs can be and are reanimated in this secret, black-budget, nudge-wink underground out of public view, not that privacy advocates sought to stop TIA. The "you naive fools drove it underground" attitude is a bit like blaming the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Constitution for the president's warrantless surveillance program: "You really shouldn't have insisted on procedural/substantive restraints and accountability, because you're just forcing me to do it secretly." (Would that privacy advocates had a tiny fraction of the power implied here!) Put another way, the programs' proponents don't seem to like meaningful civil-liberties accountability and have institutional escape hatches for avoiding such. Accordingly, I think it's dumb to criticize privacy advocates in this or other similar contexts. --Why not blame those who resurrected or permitted the resurrection of the "more potentially nefarious bits"? --Why not blame those who didn't continue to fund the privacy and security research?* More important, how do we create truly workable public accountability/oversight mechanisms for a politically powerful, extremely secretive executive branch? Sadly, I no longer believe that congressional intelligence committees provide meaningful oversight on civil-liberties issues. Lee *My recollection is that the "privacy appliance" (Genisys Privacy Protection, Teresa Lunt) either wasn't part of the original TIA portfolio (see http://www.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/overview.php, where we presented the TIA program as it was when we first learned about it) or was buried inside Genisys and then trotted out in response to privacy concerns. Also see Poindexter's presentation at DARPAtech 2002 near the bottom of http://www.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/, which mentions Genisys but not Genisys Privacy Protection. At 9:03 PM -0500 2/24/06, Dave Farber wrote:

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [IP] "Total Information Awareness" - secretly funded in defiance of Congress] Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 20:02:20 -0500 From: Peter Harsha To: dave@farber.net References: <43FF92D2.1050908@farber.net>

Hi Dave,

I blogged a bit about this way back in April 2004, noting some of my frustration that the rush to kill TIA would kill the privacy and security research that was underway and drive the more potentially nefarious bits of the program deeper into the black, hidden from view.

http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/archives/000069.html

The post was in the context of a review of some of the interesting sessions I'd attended at the Computers Freedom and Privacy conference that year, but here's the relevant bit about TIA (see the blog for all the embedded links):

A number of speakers made the point (though Doug Tygar probably made it most emphatically) that the government spends a disproportionate amount of its IT privacy and security research funding on security rather than privacy. Given the current state of funding for federal cyber security R&D (see previous blog entry), that's a sobering thought. But the frustrating part for me is that many of the same people at CFP who are now clamoring for more federal R&D for privacy related research were among the loudest voices calling for cancellation of DARPA's TIA project (I'm not including Tygar in this, as I don't know where he stood on TIA). Let me explain.

DARPA's Total Information Awareness (pdf) project was an attempt to "design a prototype network that integrates innovative information technologies for detecting and preempting foreign terrorist activities against Americans." In order to do this, DARPA was funding research into a range of technologies including real-time translation tools, data mining applications, and "privacy enhancing technologies" including development of a "privacy appliance" that would protect the identities of all individuals within any of the databases being searched until the government had the appropriate court order to reveal them. At CFP, Philippe Golle, from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, described one such project at PARC (led by Teresa Lunt), that DARPA agreed to fund for 3 years as part of TIA. The plan was to create a "privacy appliance" that owners of commercial databases of interest to the government could deploy that would control government access to the databases using inference control (deciding what types of queries -- individually or in aggregate -- might divulge identifying information), access control and an immutable audit trail to protect individual privacy. Really neat stuff.

Anyway, the idea that the government might one day deploy a TIA-like system before all of the privacy and security challenges had been sorted out and thereby imperil American civil liberties and security was worrying to a great many people and organizations, including CRA. However, there seemed to be a number of different approaches among the various people and organizations to deal with the concerns. There was a vocal contingent that believed Congress should cancel TIA outright -- the threat the research posed was greater than any possible good. CFP participant Jim Harper, of Privacilla.org, addressed this approach directly at the conference, saying the reason groups like his try to kill government programs when they're still in R&D and small is because they're too hard to kill when they get big.

CRA had a more nuanced view, I believe, that argued that the challenges that needed to be overcome before any TIA-esque system would ever be fit for deployment were large and that CRA would oppose any deployment until concerns about privacy and security were met. However, we also argued that the research required to address those concerns was worthy of continued support -- the problems of privacy and security (as well as the challenge of ever making something like TIA actually work) were truly difficult research problems..."DARPA hard" problems -- and so we opposed any research moratorium.

Unsurprisingly, the "nuanced" position failed to carry the day once Congress got involved. At about the same time Congress was deciding TIA's fate, stories broke in the press about DARPA's FutureMAP project -- which attempted to harness the predictive nature of markets to glean information about possible terrorist activities -- and JetBlue airline's release of customer data to the Defense Department (in violation of their privacy policies) that helped cement opinion that DARPA was out of control. It also didn't help that the TIA program resided in DARPA's Information Assurance Office, headed by the controversial Adm. John Poindexter. TIA's fate was sealed. Congress voted to cut all funding for the program and eliminate the IAO office at DARPA that housed it.

However, Congress also recognized that some of the technologies under development might have a role to play in the war against terrorism. They included language in the appropriations bill (Sec 8131(a)) that allowed work on the technologies to continue at unspecified intelligence agencies, provided that work was focused on non-US citizens. As a result, much of the research that had been funded by DARPA has been taken up by the Advanced Research Development Agency, the research arm of the intelligence agencies. Because it's classified, we have no way of knowing how much of TIA has been resurrected under ARDA. We also have no way of overseeing the research, no way of questioning the approach or implementation, no way of questioning the security or privacy protections (if any) included. In short, those who argued in support of a research moratorium just succeeded in driving the research underground.

Finally, one thing we do know about current TIA-related research efforts is that PARC's work on privacy-enhancing technologies is no longer being funded.

---

I'm glad to see the National Journal article has the specifics on where much of that research actually went....

-Peter

-- Peter Harsha Director of Government Affairs Computing Research Association 1100 17th St. NW, Suite 507 Washington, DC 20036 p: 202.234.2111 ext 106 c: 202.256.8271 CRA's Computing Research Policy Blog: http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog

On Feb 24, 2006, at 6:12 PM, Dave Farber wrote:

...

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Fwd: [sv4dean] "Total Information Awareness" - secretly funded in defiance of Congress Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 14:55:06 -0800 From: Hasan Diwan To: dave@farber.net References:

For IP, if you wish.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Chinarock@aol.com Date: 23-Feb-2006 21:16 Subject: [sv4dean] "Total Information Awareness" - secretly funded in defiance of Congress To: sv4dean@yahoogroups.com

*http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm*

*TIA Lives On *

By Shane Harris , *National Journal* (c) National Journal Group Inc. Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by *National Journal* and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA. .....

Sharkey played a key role in TIA's birth, when he and a close friend, retired Navy Vice Adm. *John Poindexter*, *President Reagan*'s national security adviser, brought the idea to Defense officials shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The men had teamed earlier on intelligence-technology programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which agreed to host TIA and hired Poindexter to run it in 2002. In August 2003, Poindexter was forced to resign http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51578-2003Aug12as TIA chief amid howls that his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s made him unfit to run a sensitive intelligence program. ....etc.

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