Total Information Awareness Is Back
Bruce
Schneier | October 31 2006
Remember Total
Information Awareness?
In November 2002, the New York Times reported that
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was developing a tracking
system called "Total Information Awareness" (TIA), which was intended
to detect terrorists through analyzing troves of information. The system,
developed under the direction of John Poindexter, then-director of DARPA's
Information Awareness Office, was envisioned to give law enforcement access
to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant.
TIA purported to capture the "information signature" of people
so that the government could track potential terrorists and criminals involved
in "low-intensity/low-density" forms of warfare and crime. The
goal was to track individuals through collecting as much information about
them as possible and using computer algorithms and human analysis to detect
potential activity.
The project called for the development of "revolutionary
technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories," which
would contain information from multiple sources to create a "virtual,
centralized, grand database." This database would be populated by transaction
data contained in current databases such as financial records, medical records,
communication records, and travel records as well as new sources of information.
Also fed into the database would be intelligence data.
The public found it so abhorrent, and objected so forcefully,
that Congress killed funding for the program in September 2003.
None of us thought that meant the end of TIA, only
that it would turn into a classified program and be renamed. Well, the program
is now called Tangram, and it is classified:
The government's top intelligence agency is building
a computerized system to search very large stores of information for patterns
of activity that look like terrorist planning. The system, which is run
by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the early
research phases and is being tested, in part, with government intelligence
that may contain information on U.S. citizens and other people inside the
country.
It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those
that create "suspicion scores" for suspected terrorists by analyzing
very large databases of government intelligence, as well as records of individuals'
private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.
The information about Tangram comes from a government
document looking for contractors to help design and build the system.
DefenseTech writes:
The document, which is a description of the Tangram
program for potential contractors, describes other, existing profiling and
detection systems that haven't moved beyond so-called "guilt-by-association
models," which link suspected terrorists to potential associates, but
apparently don't tell analysts much about why those links are significant.
Tangram wants to improve upon these methods, as well as investigate the
effectiveness of other detection links such as "collective inferencing,"
which attempt to create suspicion scores of entire networks of people simultaneously.
Data mining for terrorists has always been a dumb idea. And the existence
of Tangram illustrates the problem with Congress trying to stop a program
by killing its funding; it just comes back under a different name.
Prison
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