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U.S. Pressing for High-Tech Spy Tools
Feb 22 ,2004
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON
Despite an outcry over privacy implications, the government
is pressing ahead with research to create powerful tools to mine millions of
public and private records for information about terrorists.[ High-Tech Spy
Agency Has Low Profile (AP)]
Congress eliminated a Pentagon office that had been developing
this terrorist-tracking technology because of fears it might ensnare innocent
Americans. Still, some projects from retired Adm. John Poindexter's Total
Information Awareness effort were transferred to U.S. intelligence
offices, congressional, federal and research officials told The Associated Press.
In addition, Congress left undisturbed a separate but similar
$64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced
Research and Development Activity, or ARDA, that has used some of the same
researchers as Poindexter's program.
"The whole congressional action looks like a shell game,"
said Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks
work by U.S. intelligence agencies. "There may be enough of a difference for
them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical
work is continuing."
Poindexter aimed to predict terrorist attacks by identifying
telltale patterns of activity in arrests, passport applications, visas, work
permits, driver's licenses, car rentals and airline ticket buys as well as credit
transactions and education, medical and housing records.
The research created a political uproar because such reviews
of millions of transactions could put innocent Americans under suspicion. One
of Poindexter's own researchers, David D. Jensen at the University of Massachusetts,
acknowledged that "high numbers of false positives can result."
Disturbed by the privacy implications, Congress last fall
closed Poindexter's office, part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
and barred the agency from continuing most of his research. Poindexter quit
the government and complained that his work had been misunderstood. The work,
however, did not die.
In killing Poindexter's office, Congress quietly agreed to
continue paying to develop highly specialized software to gather foreign intelligence
on terrorists. In a classified section summarized publicly, Congress added money
for this software research to the "National Foreign Intelligence Program," without
identifying openly which intelligence agency would do the work. It said, for
the time being, products of this research could only be used overseas or
against non-U.S. citizens in this country, not against Americans on U.S. soil.
Congressional officials would not say which Poindexter programs
were killed and which were transferred. People with direct knowledge of the
contracts told the AP that the surviving programs included some of 18 data-mining
projects known in Poindexter's research as Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery.
Poindexter's office described that research as "technology not only for `connecting
the dots' that enable the U.S. to predict and pre-empt attacks but also for
deciding which dots to connect." It was among the most contentious research
programs.
Ted Senator, who managed that research for Poindexter, told
government contractors that mining data to identify terrorists "is much harder
than simply finding needles in a haystack." "Our task is akin to finding dangerous
groups of needles hidden in stacks of needle pieces," he said. "We must track
all the needle pieces all of the time." Among Senator's 18 projects, the work
by researcher Jensen shows how flexible such powerful software can be. Jensen
used two online databases, the Physics Preprint Archive and the Internet Movie
Database, to develop tools that would identify authoritative physics authors
and would predict whether a movie would gross more than $2 million its opening
weekend.
Jensen said in an interview that Poindexter's staff liked
his research because the data involved "people and organizations and events
... like the data in counterterrorism." At the University of Southern California,
professor Craig Knoblauch said he developed software that automatically extracted
information from travel Web sites and telephone books and tracked changes over
time. Privacy advocates feared that if such powerful tools were developed
without limits from Congress, government agents could use them on any database.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who fought to restrict Poindexter's office, is trying
to force the executive branch to tell Congress about all its data-mining projects.
He recently pleaded with a Pentagon advisory panel to propose
rules on reviewing data that Congress could turn into laws. ARDA, the research
and development office, sponsors corporate and university research on information
technology for U.S. intelligence agencies.
It is developing computer software that can extract information
from databases as well as text, voices, other audio, video, graphs, images,
maps, equations and chemical formulas. It calls its effort "Novel Intelligence
from Massive Data." The office said it has given researchers no government or
private data and obeys privacy laws. The project is part of its effort "to help
the nation avoid strategic surprise ... events critical to national security
... such as those of Sept. 11, 2001," the office said. Poindexter
had envisioned software that could quickly analyze "multiple petabytes" of data.
The Library of Congress (news - web sites) has space for 18 million books, and
one petabyte of data would fill it more than 50 times. One petabyte could hold
40 pages of text for each of the world's more than 6.2 billion people. ARDA
said its software would have to deal with "typically a petabyte or more" of
data.
It noted that some intelligence data sources "grow at the
rate of four petabytes per month." Experts said those probably are files with
satellite surveillance images and electronic eavesdropping results. The Poindexter
and ARDA projects are vastly more powerful than other data-mining projects such
as the Homeland Security Department's CAPPS II program to classify air travelers
or the six-state, Matrix anti-crime system financed by the Justice Department.
In September 2002, ARDA awarded $64 million in contracts covering 3 1/2
years. The contracts went to more than a dozen companies and university researchers,
including at least six who also had worked on Poindexter's program.
Congress threw these researchers into turmoil. Doug Lenat,
the president of Cycorp Corp. in Austin, Texas, will not discuss his work but
said he had an "enormous seven-figure deficit in our budget" because Congress
shut down Poindexter's office. Like many critics, James Dempsey
of the Center for Democracy and Technology sees a role for properly regulated
data-mining in evaluating the vast, underanalyzed data the government already
collects. Expansions of data mining, however, increase "the risk of an innocent
person being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of having rented the wrong
apartment ... or having a name similar to the name of some bad guy," he said.
On the Net:
DARPA: http://www.darpa.mil
ARDA: http://www.ic-arda.org
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