Pentagon Readies 
Total Information Awareness system (TIA)

Massive Spying System 

MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN / AP 20may03

[TIA background info below AP article]

WASHINGTON—To thwart terrorists, the Pentagon is developing a computer surveillance system that would give U.S. agents fingertip access to government and commercial records from around the world that could fill the Library of Congress more than 50 times.

The library's collection of more than 18 million books would be dwarfed by the size of the computerized files the government wants to mine for clues that terrorists are planning attacks.

The prospect of what the Pentagon calls the Total Information Awareness (TIA) [aka: Terrorism Information Awareness] system has alarmed privacy advocates on both ends of the political spectrum. In February, Congress barred use of the still-to-be-developed system against American citizens and ordered a full description of the plans developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. That report was to be delivered to Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

Also Tuesday, the Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that advocates online privacy, was giving a House Judiciary subcommittee a report that concluded, "There are few legal constraints on government access to commercial databases." Neither the Privacy Act nor the Constitution protect consumer data held by private companies, and other laws "are riddled with exceptions for law enforcement or intelligence uses."

The center's executive director, Jim Dempsey, said in prepared testimony, "Since 9/11, the FBI is authorized by the attorney general to go looking for information about individuals with no reason to believe they are engaged in, or planning, or connected to any wrongdoing."

In advice to would-be TIA contractors, DARPA disclosed that the project will require "gathering a much broader array of data than we do currently" and break down barriers that keep separate data already collected by a host of agencies.

"The amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes," the agency instructions said. A byte amounts to the electronic representation of one letter of the alphabet, and a petabyte is a quadrillion - 1,000,000,000,000,000 - bytes.

DARPA, which developed the Internet, is again trying to expand the boundaries of existing technology. Among the largest databases on the Internet is an archive of the last five years of Web pages; it consumes 100 terabytes, or one-tenth of a petabyte.

Despite privacy fears, government documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that scores of major defense contractors and prominent universities applied last year for the first research contracts to design the surveillance and analysis system.

Conceived and managed by retired Adm. John Poindexter, the TIA surveillance system is based on his theory that "terrorists must engage in certain transactions to coordinate and conduct attacks against Americans, and these transactions form patterns that may be detectable."

DARPA said the goal is to predict terrorist actions by analyzing such transactions as passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, car rentals, airline ticket purchases, arrests or reports of suspicious activities.

Other databases DARPA wants to make available to U.S. agents include financial, education, medical and housing records and biometric identification databases based on fingerprints, irises, facial shapes and gait.

TIA is developing breakthrough software "for treating these databases as a virtual, centralized grand database" capable of being quickly mined by counterintelligence officers even though the data will be held in many places, many languages and many formats, DARPA documents say.

Poindexter's project would integrate some projects DARPA has been working on for several years, including an effort to develop a radar-based device that could identify people by the way they walk.

Operating on the theory that an individual's walk is as unique as a signature, DARPA-financed researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been 80 to 95 percent successful in identifying people. If DARPA orders a prototype, the individual "gait signatures" of people could become part of the data accessed by TIA.

At a cost of less than $1 million over the past three years, researchers headed by Gene Greneker have been aiming a 1-foot-square radar dish at 100 test volunteers to record how they walk. Elsewhere at Georgia Tech, DARPA is financing other researchers who use video cameras and computers to try to develop distinctive gait signatures.

"One of the nice things about radar is we see through bad weather, darkness, even a heavy robe shrouding the legs, and video cameras can't," Greneker said in an interview. "At 600 feet we can do quite well."

The target doesn't have to be doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk to be distinctive, because the radar detects small frequency shifts in the reflected signal off legs, arms and the torso as they move in a combination of different speeds and directions.

The system could be used by embassy security officers to conclude that a shadowy figure observed a few hundred feet away at night or in heavy clothing on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday was the same person and should be investigated further to see if he was casing the building for an attack, Greneker said.

At a restricted facility, the technology could warn security officers that an approaching person was probably not an employee by comparing his gait with those on file. "And we now know how to detect people who are carrying heavy packages, which could include a 25-pound bomb in a backpack," Greneker said.

DARPA contracting records made available through a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group, show Poindexter agreed to pay for 26 research projects and rejected 154 others through last Dec. 4. Other DARPA contract award data were released under FOIA to the Center for Public Integrity, an ethics advocacy group.

source of diagram: DARPA http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm 20may03

Information Awareness Office (IAO) Mission 

The DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO) will imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate, and transition information technologies, components, and prototype closed-loop information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness that is useful for preemption, national security warning, and national security decision making. 

IAO Vision 

The most serious asymmetric threat facing the United States is terrorism, a threat characterized by collections of people loosely organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to identify and define. IAO plans to develop technology that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks, their plans, and potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats. To effectively and efficiently carry this out, we must promote sharing, collaborating and reasoning to convert nebulous data to knowledge and actionable options. IAO will accomplish this by pursuing the development of technologies, components, and applications to produce a proto-type system. Example technologies include:

• Collaboration and sharing over TCP/IP networks across agency boundaries 
• Large, distributed repositories with dynamic schemas that can be changed interactively by users 
• Foreign language machine translation and speech recognition 
• Biometric signatures of humans 
• Real time learning, pattern matching and anomalous pattern detection 
• Entity extraction from natural language text 
• Human network analysis and behavior model building engines 
• Event prediction and capability development model building engines 
• Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning 
• Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance 
• Business rules sub-systems for access control and process management 
• Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control 
• Other aids for human cognition and human reasoning 

It is difficult to counter the threat that terrorists pose. Currently, terrorists are able to move freely throughout the world, to hide when necessary, to find unpunished sponsorship and support, to operate in small, independent cells, and to strike infrequently, exploiting weapons of mass effects and media response to influence governments. This low-intensity/low-density form of warfare has an information signature, albeit not one that our intelligence infrastructure and other government agencies are optimized to detect. In all cases, terrorists have left detectable clues that are generally found after an attack. Even if we could find these clues faster and more easily, our counter-terrorism defenses are spread throughout many different agencies and organizations at the national, state, and local level. To fight terrorism, we need to create a new intelligence infrastructure to allow these agencies to share information and collaborate effectively, and new information technology aimed at exposing terrorists and their activities and support systems. This is a tremendously difficult problem, because terrorists understand how vulnerable they are and seek to hide their specific plans and capabilities. The key to fighting terrorism is information. Elements of the solution include gathering a much broader array of data than we do currently, discovering information from elements of the data, creating models of hypotheses, and analyzing these models in a collaborative environment to determine the most probable current or future scenario. DARPA has sponsored research in some of these technology areas, but additional research and development is warranted to accelerate, integrate, broaden, and automate current approaches.

source: http://www.darpa.mil/iao/index.htm 20may03