[Clips] Homeland Security revives TIA

[R.A. Hettinga]

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  Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 22:31:57 -0500
  To: Philodox Clips List <clips at philodox.com>
  From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
  Subject: [Clips] Homeland Security revives TIA
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<http://washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20070308-124323-4382r>

  The Washington Times

  www.washingtontimes.com

  Homeland Security revives supersnoop

  By Audrey Hudson

  THE WASHINGTON TIMES

  Published March 8, 2007


  Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that
  sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible
  terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for
  investigations.

     The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the
  Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by
  Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.

     A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project
  called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and
  Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin
  Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

     The investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy laws,
  and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq war
  supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a panel aide
  said.

     The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track
  individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer
  algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can
  predict terrorist behavior.

     Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details,
  medical records, travel and banking information.

     Privacy concerns prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to
  introduce legislation in January to require that government agencies
  disclose data-mining practices in regular reports to Congress.

     "A serious discussion on the implications of data-mining programs is
  long overdue," Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and a sponsor of the
  bill, said yesterday. Sen. John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, is
  also a bill sponsor.

     "Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of secret
  government programs analyzing their personal information. Congress needs to
  know more about the operational aspects and privacy implications of
  data-mining programs before these programs are allowed to go forward," Mr.
  Feingold said.

     A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not return a
  call for comment.

     Congress also tucked language inside Homeland Security's spending bill
  in September requiring an investigation by the agency's inspector general,
  but allowed $40 million in funding to go forward in this year's budget.

     "The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and
  correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence
  on terrorists," the spending bill said. "A prototype is currently available
  to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data,
  including some on U.S. citizens."

     According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in March
  2003, TIA planned "to use data mining technologies to sift through personal
  transactions in electronic data to find patterns and associations connected
  to terrorist threats and activities."

     "Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project
  provoked expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion of
  privacy of law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the direction
  of the project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra
  affair," the CRS report said.

     "While the law enforcement and intelligence communities argue that more
  sophisticated information gathering techniques are essential to combat
  today's sophisticated terrorists, civil libertarians worry that the
  government's increased capability to assemble information will result in
  increased and unchecked government power, and the erosion of individual
  privacy," the report said.

     ADVISE was initiated in 2003 following the demise of the TIA project.

     The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive quantities
  of information from many different sources" to find "hidden relationships
  in the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories
  and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a Homeland Security workshop
  that outlined this and other technology under development.

     The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million
  "relationships" or connections per hour, says the report, which included an
  example of how friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be
  linked by pinging the data.

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  -----------------
  R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
  The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
  44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
  "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'