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 Public Protest Over Pentagon Surveillance System Mounts
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The Pentagon's proposed "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) 
surveillance system is coming under increasing attack. In an 
open letter sent yesterday, a coalition of over 30 civil liberties 
groups urged Senators Thomas Daschle (D-SD) and Trent Lott (R-MS) 
to "act immediately to stop the development of this unconstitutional 
system of public surveillance."   

Newspapers across the country have written editorials castigating 
the program. The New York Times has said that "Congress should shut 
down the program pending a thorough investigation." The Washington 
Post wrote, "The defense secretary should appoint an outside 
committee to oversee it before it proceeds." William Safire's 
recent column, which played a major role in igniting the public 
outcry, called the surveillance system "a supersnooper's dream."  

The TIA project is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects 
Agency (DARPA)'s Information Awareness Office, headed by John 
Poindexter. The surveillance system purports to capture a person's 
"information signature" so that the government can track potential 
terrorists and criminals involved in "low-intensity/low-density" 
forms of warfare and crime.  The goal of the system is to track 
individuals by collecting as much information about them as possible 
and using computer algorithms and human analysis to detect potential 
activity.   

The project calls 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.  Intelligence data would also be fed into the 
database.  

A key component of the project is the development of data mining or 
knowledge discovery tools that will sift through the massive amount 
of information to find patterns and associations.  The surveillance 
plan will also improve the power of search tools such as Project 
Genoa, which Poindexter's former employer Syntek Technologies assisted 
in developing.  The Defense Department aims to fund the development 
of more such tools and data mining technology to help analysts 
understand and even "preempt" future action.   

A further crucial component is the development of biometric technology 
to enable the identification and tracking of individuals.  DARPA has 
already funded its "Human ID at a Distance" program, which aims to 
positively identify people from a distance through technologies such as 
face recognition and gait recognition.  A nationwide identification 
system might also be of great assistance to such a project by providing 
an easy means to track individuals across multiple information sources. 
 The initial plan calls for a five year research project into these various 
technologies.  According to the announcement soliciting industry 
proposals, the interim goal is to build "leave-behind prototypes with 
a limited number of proof-of-concept demonstrations in extremely high 
risk, high payoff areas."  The FBI and the Transportation Security 
Administration (TSA) are also working on data mining projects that will 
merge commercial databases, public databases, and intelligence data.   

Documents obtained by EPIC through the Freedom of Information Act 
(FOIA) show that the developers of the new passenger profiling system 
in the TSA held meetings with Poindexter's team earlier this year.  EPIC 
is currently involved in a FOIA lawsuit to obtain documents from the 
Information Awareness Office.  

The coalition's letter to Senators Daschle and Lott is available at:

    http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/tialetter11.18.02.html

EPIC's Total Information Awareness Page:

    http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/

Information Awareness Office's Total Information Awareness project
description:

    http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm

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Source: EPIC - http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_9.23.html


Cheers, Steve..

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