TIA Lives On (so that's where it went...)

[coderman]

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.

""It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of
the classified intelligence budget.""

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.

A $19 million contract to build the prototype system was awarded in
late 2002 to Hicks & Associates, a consulting firm in Arlington, Va.,
that is run by former Defense and military officials. Congress's
decision to pull TIA's funding in late 2003 "caused a significant
amount of uncertainty for all of us about the future of our work,"
Hicks executive Brian Sharkey wrote in an e-mail to subcontractors at
the time. "Fortunately," Sharkey continued, "a new sponsor has come
forward that will enable us to continue much of our previous work."
Sources confirm that this new sponsor was ARDA. Along with the new
sponsor came a new name. "We will be describing this new effort as
'Basketball,' " Sharkey wrote, apparently giving no explanation of the
name's significance. Another e-mail from a Hicks employee, Marc
Swedenburg, reminded the company's staff that "TIA has been terminated
and should be referenced in that fashion."

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 as 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.

It's unclear whether work on Basketball continues. Sharkey didn't
respond to an interview request, and Poindexter said he had no comment
about former TIA programs. But a publicly available Defense Department
document, detailing various "cooperative agreements and other
transactions" conducted in fiscal 2004, shows that Basketball was
fully funded at least until the end of that year (September 2004). The
document shows that the system was being tested at a research center
jointly run by ARDA and SAIC Corp., a major defense and intelligence
contractor that is the sole owner of Hicks & Associates. The document
describes Basketball as a "closed-loop, end-to-end prototype system
for early warning and decision-making," exactly the same language used
in contract documents for the TIA prototype system when it was awarded
to Hicks in 2002. An SAIC spokesman declined to comment for this
story.

Another key TIA project that moved to ARDA was Genoa II, which focused
on building information technologies to help analysts and policy
makers anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks. Genoa II was renamed
Topsail when it moved to ARDA, intelligence sources confirmed. (The
name continues the program's nautical nomenclature; "genoa" is a
synonym for the headsail of a ship.)

As recently as October 2005, SAIC was awarded a $3.7 million contract
under Topsail. According to a government-issued press release
announcing the award, "The objective of Topsail is to develop
decision-support aids for teams of intelligence analysts and policy
personnel to assist in anticipating and pre-empting terrorist threats
to U.S. interests." That language repeats almost verbatim the
boilerplate descriptions of Genoa II contained in contract documents,
Pentagon budget sheets, and speeches by the Genoa II program's former
managers.

As early as February 2003, the Pentagon planned to use Genoa II
technologies at the Army's Information Awareness Center at Fort
Belvoir, Va., according to an unclassified Defense budget document.
The awareness center was an early tester of various TIA tools,
according to former employees. A 2003 Pentagon report to Congress
shows that the Army center was part of an expansive network of
intelligence agencies, including the NSA, that experimented with the
tools. The center was also home to the Army's Able Danger program,
which has come under scrutiny after some of its members said they used
data-analysis tools to discover the name and photograph of 9/11
ringleader Mohamed Atta more than a year before the attacks.

Devices developed under Genoa II's predecessor -- which Sharkey also
managed when he worked for the Defense Department -- were used during
the invasion of Afghanistan and as part of "the continuing war on
terrorism," according to an unclassified Defense budget document.
Today, however, the future of Topsail is in question. A spokesman for
the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., which administers the
program's contracts, said it's "in the process of being canceled due
to lack of funds."

It is unclear when funding for Topsail was terminated. But earlier
this month, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, one of TIA's
strongest critics questioned whether intelligence officials knew that
some of its programs had been moved to other agencies. Sen. Ron Wyden,
D-Ore., asked Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and
FBI Director Robert Mueller whether it was "correct that when [TIA]
was closed, that several ... projects were moved to various
intelligence agencies.... I and others on this panel led the effort to
close [TIA]; we want to know if Mr. Poindexter's programs are going on
somewhere else."

Negroponte and Mueller said they didn't know. But Negroponte's deputy,
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who until recently was director of the NSA,
said, "I'd like to answer in closed session." Asked for comment,
Wyden's spokeswoman referred to his hearing statements.

The NSA is now at the center of a political firestorm over President
Bush's program to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of people
in the United States who the agency believes are connected to
terrorists abroad. While the documents on the TIA programs don't show
that their tools are used in the domestic eavesdropping, and
knowledgeable sources wouldn't discuss the matter, the TIA programs
were designed specifically to develop the kind of "early-warning
system" that the president said the NSA is running.

Documents detailing TIA, Genoa II, Basketball, and Topsail use the
phrase "early-warning system" repeatedly to describe the programs'
ultimate aims. In speeches, Poindexter has described TIA as an
early-warning and decision-making system. He conceived of TIA in part
because of frustration over the lack of such tools when he was
national security chief for Reagan.

Tom Armour, the Genoa II program manager, declined to comment for this
story. But in a previous interview, he said that ARDA -- which
absorbed the TIA programs -- has pursued technologies that would be
useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic.
"That's, in fact, what the interest is," Armour said. When TIA was
still funded, its program managers and researchers had "good
coordination" with their counterparts at ARDA and discussed their
projects on a regular basis, Armour said. The former No. 2 official in
Poindexter's office, Robert Popp, averred that the NSA didn't use TIA
tools in domestic eavesdropping as part of his research. But asked
whether the agency could have used the tools apart from TIA, Popp
replied, "I can't speak to that." Asked to comment on TIA projects
that moved to ARDA, Don Weber, an NSA spokesman said, "As I'm sure you
understand, we can neither confirm nor deny actual or alleged projects
or operational capabilities; therefore, we have no information to
provide."

ARDA now is undergoing some changes of its own. The outfit is being
taken out of the NSA, placed under the control of Negroponte's office,
and given a new name. It will be called the "Disruptive Technology
Office," a reference to a term of art describing any new invention
that suddenly, and often dramatically, replaces established
procedures. Officials with the intelligence director's office did not
respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.