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

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [IP] WORTH READING "Total Information Awareness" - secretly
funded in defiance of Congress]]
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 00:25:13 -0500
From: steven cherry <steven () panix com>
To: dave () farber net
References: <43FFBB04.9070108 () farber net>

> -------- 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 () cra org>
> To: dave () farber net
>
> 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.

Dave,

Nor was Peter alone. For my part, in the fall of 2003, I wrote two
articles about this. Neither seems to be publicly available right
now, but the first was mentioned on the IP list, quoting the first
part of the article, at
<http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200309/msg00265.html>.

In the second, I took a careful look at some of the funding issues
surrounding TIA, and speculated that some parts of the program might
be reborn at DHS, a supposition I've had difficulty learning the
truth or falsity of. Here's the text of that short article, from our
November 2003 issue, in its entirety.

 Steven

TIA Is Dead-Long Live TIA
Terrorism Information Awareness is defunded and broken up,
but could breed many little TIAs

SECURITY*Terrorism Information
Awareness (TIA), a U.S. defense department
program to mine credit card, medical,
travel, police, and other governmental
data, is being disbanded. Originally
called Total Information Awareness, TIA
got nothing but bad press because of its
Orwellian name and mission.

A joint House-Senate appropriations
conference committee voted on 24 September
to defund TIA through 2004, along
with its bureaucratic parent, the Information
Awareness Office, a branch of the
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (Darpa) that Admiral John Poindexter
had headed. But the committee allowed
some programs to continue under different
offices and agencies, a decision ratified on
the House and Senate floors. The effect,
ironically, will be to make some TIA programs
less visible and less accountable.
"Killing the Information Awareness
Office is a positive first step," says David
Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center (Washington,
D.C.), "but it doesn't eliminate the government's
datamining initiatives. It drives
them underground."

Killing it softly

The provision defunding TIA, part of the
2004 Department of Defense budget now
signed into law, allows eight Information
Awareness Office programs to be continued
elsewhere in Darpa. In addition,
related research will be carried out by an
obscure counterintelligence program
known as the National Foreign Intelligence
Program (NFIP).

NFIP is jointly managed by an assortment
of intelligence agencies, including
the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, and the National
Security Agency. Its budget is classified,
as is the full definition of the work it is now
authorized to develop-the committee
report refers only to "processing, analysis,
and collaboration tools for counterterrorism
foreign intelligence." NFIP is enjoined
by the new law, however, from using any of
those processing, analysis, and collaboration
tools domestically.

As of year-end 2002, TIA had agreed to
fund 26 research projects in all, according
to documents obtained earlier this year
under the Freedom of Information Act by
advocacy groups. The fiscal 2003 budgets
for those programs, running from October
2002 through September 2003, were about
US $140 million, according to a report prepared
by the cyber rights group Electronic
Frontier Foundation (San Francisco). The
2004 budget for all TIA programs, which
are currently all at the research stage, would
have been about $169 million.

Some of those programs, to the extent
they have been disclosed, have not fared
well in the court of public opinion. In
May, the press ridiculed a $1 million
Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta)
research effort that analyzed the way people
walk and tried to create unique "gait
signatures" for them. Another supposedly
outlandish program, LifeLog, was a
multimedia superdiary that would record
everything a person said and did. Both
programs are now defunded.

The eight Information Awareness
Office programs allowed to continue are
(with Darpa's requested fiscal year 2004
budget amounts in parentheses): Bio-Event
Advanced Leading Indicator Recognition
Technology ($6.3 million); Rapid Analytical
Wargaming ($7.5 million); Wargaming the
Asymmetric Environment ($8.2 million);
and five projects to translate and analyze
spoken and written natural language, for a
grand total of $51.2 million.

What's not completely clear is the role
NFIP will play in salvaging TIA projects,
or which of the many agencies that run
NFIP will be involved. The FBI, for example,
normally does no research of the sort
that TIA sponsored.

Another place to which TIA-like
research could move is a new Darpa-like
entity, the Department of Homeland
Security Advanced Research Projects
Agency. With a hefty first-year budget of
$800 million and a deputy director who
held that title at Darpa, the new Arpa on
the block could provide a second string in
the bow of any military-related research
looking for a sponsor. -Steven M.Cherry



-- 
   Steven Cherry, +1 212-419-7566
   Senior Associate Editor
   IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave,  New York, NY 10016
   <s.cherry () ieee org>  <http://www.spectrum.ieee.org>

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