TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Friday, March 09, 2007

From Washington Times March 8, 2007:

" Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.

The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

The investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy laws, and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq war supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a panel aide said.

The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict terrorist behavior.

Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.

Privacy concerns prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to introduce legislation in January to require that government agencies disclose data-mining practices in regular reports to Congress.

"A serious discussion on the implications of data-mining programs is long overdue," Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, said yesterday. Sen. John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, is also a bill sponsor.
[...]
"The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on terrorists," the spending bill said. "A prototype is currently available to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens."

According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in March 2003, TIA planned "to use data mining technologies to sift through personal transactions in electronic data to find patterns and associations connected to terrorist threats and activities."

"Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project provoked expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion of privacy of law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the direction of the project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair," the CRS report said.[...]

ADVISE was initiated in 2003 following the demise of the TIA project.

The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive quantities of information from many different sources" to find "hidden relationships in the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a Homeland Security workshop that outlined this and other technology under development.

The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million "relationships" or connections per hour, says the report, which included an example of how friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be linked by pinging the data.

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Labels: police state

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