[IP] WORTH READING "Total Information Awareness" - secretly funded in defiance of Congress]]

Fri Feb 24 18:03:48 PST 2006

-------- 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 <harsha at cra.org>
To: dave at farber.net
References: <43FF92D2.1050908 at 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 <hasan.diwan at gmail.com>
> To: dave at farber.net
> References: <a1.70dbecb5.312ff09a at aol.com>
>
> For IP, if you wish.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Chinarock at aol.com <Chinarock at aol.com>
> Date: 23-Feb-2006 21:16
> Subject: [sv4dean] "Total Information Awareness" - secretly funded in
> defiance of Congress
> To: sv4dean at yahoogroups.com
>
> *http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm*
>
> *TIA Lives On *
>
> By Shane Harris <sharris at nationaljournal.com>, *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/A51578-2003Aug12>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.
> ....etc.
>
>
>  Links to Democracy for America...
> <http://www.democracyforamerica.com/>
> <http://www.dfa.meetup.com/>
> <http://dfasv.org/>
>
>
>
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>
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Hasan Diwan <hasan.diwan at gmail.com>
>

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