| ‘Total Information Awareness’
imperils civil rights, critics say
By JOE FEUERHERD
Washington
Even its supporters must now doubt the wisdom of the
Orwellian-like name selected for the Pentagon’s technology-based effort to
track terrorists: the Total Information Awareness System.
Worse yet for civil libertarians concerned about government
intrusions, the program resides in the Pentagon’s Information Awareness
Office. The motto: “Knowledge is Power.”
What some might consider linguistic missteps have not, however,
stopped the Bush administration or Congress from moving ahead with a high-tech
plan that supporters say will help catch terrorists before they act, but
which opponents fear will evolve into a tool the state will use to harass
citizens, particularly those who disagree with whoever happens to be running
the government at the time.
If Total Information Awareness wasn’t controversial enough,
the man tapped to develop it -- retired Admiral John Poindexter -- has a past
that many in Washington assumed relegated him to bureaucratic oblivion. As
national security adviser to Ronald Reagan, Poindexter engineered the diversion
of funds from Iranian arms sales to the contra rebels in Nicaragua, and then
was convicted of lying to Congress about the episode. That conviction was
overturned by the courts, which found the immunity Poindexter enjoyed in his
Congressional testimony extended to the criminal charges.
Poindexter was appointed to head the Information Awareness Office,
a branch of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) early this
year.
The idea behind Total Information Awareness is simple enough: Use
existing commercial and government databases to track suspected terrorists as
they plot their destructive schemes. It’s a variation on a technique --
data mining -- that technologically savvy private sector marketers employ every
day. In the private sector, a potential customer’s travels, both virtual
and real, are tracked through the “signatures” each transaction or
communication yields. Potential customers who frequent winter-getaway Web
sites, for example, might be prime candidates to purchase a pair of skis.
Targeting those prospects -- through e-mail, direct mail or advertising -- is
legal, relatively cheap and highly effective.
In an August speech, Poindexter elaborated on how the Pentagon
would employ such methods -- not to entice new customers, but to target
terrorists.
“If terrorist organizations are going to plan and execute
attacks against the United States, their people must engage in transactions and
they will leave signatures in this information space,” he told an agency
conference. “This low-intensity/low-density form of warfare has an
information signature. We must be able to pick this signal out of the noise,
[and] the relevant information extracted from this data must be made available
in large-scale repositories with enhanced semantic content for analysis to
accomplish this task.”
Poindexter continued: “Total Information Awareness -- a
prototype system -- is our answer. We must be able to detect, classify,
identify and track terrorists so that we may understand their plans and act to
prevent them from being executed. To protect our rights, we must ensure that
our systems track the terrorists and those that mean us harm.”
Privacy proponents and civil libertarians are not buying
Poindexter’s benign interpretations. Wrote New York Times columnist
William Safire: “To [the] computerized dossier on your private life from
commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about
you -- passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records,
judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the FBI, your
lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance -- and you have
the supersnoop’s dream: a ‘Total Information Awareness’ about
every U.S. citizen.”
Further, said Georgetown University law professor David Cole, the
Pentagon aims to “create the technology by which the military can gain
access to all the computer accessible information that exists out there in the
world about any of us.” Government access to such information, even when
no criminal activity is suspected or “probable cause” established,
“is a very scary power and one that is subject to tremendous abuse,”
he told NCR.
Meanwhile, a group with otherwise widely divergent views --
representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the
American Way along with Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Paul
Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation -- signed a Nov. 18 letter to Senate
Leaders Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Trent Lott, R-Miss. The group was unsuccessful
in an effort to gut the program. They urged the Senate to reject Total
Information Awareness during their recent vote on homeland security
legislation.
The homeland security legislation includes provisions to establish
the Total Information Awareness program within a new agency, the Security
Advanced Research Projects Agency, which Poindexter is expected to lead. Plus,
the legislation removed some restrictions on government information-gathering
first enacted as part of the Privacy Act of 1974.
But it’s early yet. Given the level of controversy generated,
Total Information Awareness will likely be subject to intense Congressional
scrutiny. And earlier this month, the Army announced that the consulting firm
of Booz Allen Hamilton was to receive $1.5 million of the $63 million in fees
it will ultimately garner for its assistance on the project.
The consultant’s work, said the Army announcement, “is
expected to be completed by Nov. 7, 2007.”
Joe Feuerherd is NCR Washington correspondent. His
e-mail address is jfeuerherd@natcath.org
Related Web site
Total Information
Awareness
www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm
National Catholic Reporter, November 29,
2002
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