Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Government Still Seeking High-Tech Spy Tools

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 01:56:05 -0500

Spy Tools
Pentagon's Controversial Terrorism Research Lives On at Other Agencies
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, AP

WASHINGTON (Feb. 22) - 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.

Congress eliminated a Pentagon office that had been developing this 
terrorist-tracking technology because of fears it might ensnare innocent
Americans.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/ats-ap_technology10feb22,1,4628057.story?coll=sns-technology-headlines
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 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.

02-22-04 15:31 EST

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