Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal
Data of Americans  

By JOHN MARKOFF

The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a 
vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of 
the hunt for terrorists around the globe - including the United States.  

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has 
described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will 
provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant 
access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit 
card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search  
warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted 
to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But 
Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan 
administration, has argued that the government needs broad new 
powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of 
electronic life in the United States.  

Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents 
and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the 
government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate 
commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence 
agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful 
computers.  

"We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we 
find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, 
generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to 
knowledge, and create actionable options," he said in a speech in 
California earlier this year.  

Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to 
take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense 
Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is 
responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake 
of the Sept. 11 attacks.  

In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information 
Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been 
proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that 
is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act 
of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do 
with private information.   

The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let 
intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil 
liberties proponents.  

"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," said 
Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center 
in Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology 
is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of 
national surveillance of the American public."  

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been briefed on the 
project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a lunch to discuss it, 
according to a Pentagon spokesman.  

"As part of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a 
variety of organizations, to include the law enforcement community," 
a Pentagon spokeswoman said.  

An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, 
said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the Pentagon 
about the project but that no final decision had been made about what 
information the F.B.I. might add to the system.  

A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, Gordon 
Johndroe, said officials in the office were not familiar with the 
computer project and he declined to discuss concerns raised by the 
project's critics without knowing more about it.  

He referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials 
said they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too 
were not familiar enough with the project.  

Some members of a panel of computer scientists and policy experts 
who were asked by the Pentagon to review the privacy implications 
this summer said terrorists might find ways to avoid detection and 
that the system might be easily abused.  

"A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about 
the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this 
administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer 
scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing 
Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."  

Other technology policy experts dispute that assessment and support 
Admiral Poindexter's position that linking of databases is necessary 
to track potential enemies operating inside the United States.  

"They're conceptualizing the problem in the way we've suggested it 
needs to be understood," said Philip Zelikow, a historian who is 
executive director of the Markle Foundation task force on National 
Security in the Information Age. "They have a pretty good vision of 
the need to make the tradeoffs in favor of more sharing and openness."  

On Wednesday morning, the panel reported its findings to Dr. Tony 
Tether, the director of the defense research agency, urging development 
of technologies to protect privacy as well as surveillance, according 
to several people who attended the meeting.  

If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly 
bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would 
soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.  

The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern recognition 
techniques known as "data mining," a set of statistical techniques used 
by scientists as well as by marketers searching for potential customers. 

The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and 
view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and 
groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, 
all from their individual computers.  

The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test data 
that would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security Command 
at Fort Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system would be 
put into operation.  

The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the 
government to lash together both commercial and government data to 
hunt for patterns of terrorist activities.  

"What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system 
to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify 
and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby 
enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and 
defeat terrorist acts," said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the 
defense research agency.  

Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who 
was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had 
worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral 
Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court 
because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before  
Congress about the case.

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Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/politics/09COMP.html?ex=1037509
200&en=873ff5626a3c666e&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

Cheers, Steve..

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