Posted on 03/12/2004 8:05:46 PM PST by djf
Lost in the uproar over TIA and the Congression action that halted it were two related privacy projects, one relating to government records and one to medical records - technology that would have scrambled names with a key that could only have been unlocked with a warrant. Those unfortunately fell by the wayside. And it was Congress that passed the legislation that shifted some of TIA's work to ARDA - - not Bush acting alone, as you've insinuated. And, quite frankly, the federal government does need to develop much better data mining technologies - although they should concentrate on their existing data stream before trying to go out and get more data.
The point is, the debate on federal data mining isn't as black-and-white as you make it out to be, and you always resort to hyperbole and omission to sell your Bush-bashing positions. So folks who read your 14-point Arial font screeds on FR should always take them with a very, very large grain of salt as a result.
...it was Congress that passed the legislation that shifted some of TIA's work to ARDA - - not Bush acting alone, as you've insinuated.
Granted, that the legislation moving the bulk of TIA (primarily funding) over to ARDA, was passed by Congress. But, just like the (ANTI)Patriot Act and like the Homeland Fatherland Security Act, that created TIA, the legislation that moved the bulk of TIA over t ARDA, was crafted at the Whitehouse and the quavering, weak-kneed Republicans in Congress passed it, for fear of losing party support in the upcoming elections. Bush doesn't act alone. He doesn't have to. He has learned that half of the Republicans in Congress are RINOs like himself and that he can control most of what's left through intimidation.
...the federal government does need to develop much better data mining technologies...
Perhaps you are not familiar with exactly what data mining is or you have not read the 4th Amendment. The term "data mining", was chosen because of its similarity to gold mining, where the miners dig out and sift through tons of worthless stone, to find a very small amount of gold. They usually have some reason to believe that gold may be found in the area. But, even that belief is often based only upon a geologist's hunch or best guess.
It's the same with data mining. Computers randomly sift through massive amounts of worthless data, to find a very small amount of possibly valuable information. Businesses do this all the time. But then, businesses don't have access to every piece of private data about you, as would be the case with TIA. It's bad enough that so much of our private data is tied to our Social Security number. That's why we have such a problem with identity theft here in the US and why it's almost unheard of anywhere else. Nowhere else has such an all pervasive identification number, though UK and others are moving in that direction. But, to get back to the point, when all that data is to be found in one place, it will be a hacker's bonanza. One hacker site that I visit regularly, as an IT security consultant, described the TIA database as the "Holy Grail of Hackerdom", suggesting that being the first hacker to penetrate the TIA database would rank that hacker right up there with the likes of Kevin Mitnick and several others who have yet to be caught.
Various informed estimates, from qualified sources within the IT security arena, put the first penetration of the TIA database at somewhere between 3 months and one year after it officially goes on line. Of course, the hacker/phreak sites don't even give it that long. That's because they know that every elite hacker in the world will be focused on that database from the moment it goes online. They realize that there will be a few arrests. But, that's a minor risk to such people (phreaks), when compared with the chance to reach the "Holy Grail of Hackerdom" and be immortalized by your peers in the Phreak community. To them, it's worth the risk of going to jail. It will happen. It will be only a matter of time. The Whitehouse and government law enforcement agencies know this. But, they don't give a d@mn about our privacy. In fact, eliminating privacy is what TIA is all about, which brings us back to the 4th Amendment.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Data mining is a direct violation of the 4th Amendment, as it is a RANDOM search, without any probable cause. Data pertaining to millions of innocent transactions, by millions of innocent people every day, will be gathered up and sifted through, for signs of "impropriety". No probable cause. No warrant. No description of what they are looking for. They are just searching for anything that does not look normal.
That's no different than if the FBI were to go down every street and stop by every house and search it for anything out of the norm. Have waiters been reporting all of their tips? Are all of your guns registered? Do you read subversive material, like (heaven forbid) the Limbaugh Letter? Were all of the drugs in your medicine cabinet purchased in the US or did some of them come from Canada? What might they find out about you, that would cast suspicion on you?
Actually, there really is a difference in a physical search and a TIA search. With TIA, they won't have to come to your house. They won't even have to leave their office. You won't have any idea that they have given you a KGB-style anal exam and that, as a result, you are on a watch list,... that is, until the bank asks you to take your business elsewhere and your employer decided to do away with your job. After all, who wants to take a chance on employing someone who is under suspicion by the government and what bank wants to take a chance that someone being watched by the government may be laundering money through their bank? Orwell missed the date by about 20 years. It wasn't 1984. But, thanks to Dubya, the rest of his imaginings are well underway in 2004.
Cities like New York, where possession of a firearm is illegal, could be notified that you bought a box of .38 cal. ammunition in Vermont last week. After all, that's a suspicious activity, for someone who is not supposed to have a gun. Of course, the fact that you subscribe to three gun magazines is a suspicious activity in and of itself, regardless of where you live. But, nothing and I mean NOTHING could be any more suspicious than having a login on that subversive web forum, FreeRepublic. All of this information is available to law enforcement today. But, the difference is that today, they have to have a warrant, backed by (what was that phrase?) "probable cause". In other words, they still have to adhere to the limits imposed on their power in that annoying Constitution. But, Dubya, Ashcroft and Poindexter are well on their way to eliminating that minor nuisance. After all, who needs a Constitution, when we have King George to take care of us?
What scares me and what King George seems to have not considered, is what will happen when it is no longer King George, but Queen Hillary, who will benefit from Dubya's extirpation of the Constitution. Sooner or later, a liberal will be back in the Whitehouse and what Dubya and his minions have wrought today, will come back to haunt us in spades.
So, you see, there are two problems with TIA. It is a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment and makes every US citizen suspect. The government needs to get out of the business of non-specific searches, where there is no evidence of a crime. But, even worse, is the supreme idiocy of anyone, even conceiving of putting all that information in one place, where one hacker, could gain access to every Social Security number, every credit card number, every address, every phone number, every mother's maiden name, etc. of every American.
CAN YOU SAY IDENTITY THEFT?
Then imagine it on a scale a hundred thousand times or a million times more massive than when the Amazon.com computers were hacked a few years ago and hackers downloaded around 30,000 credit card numbers. How would you like to see all of your credit card and bank account numbers posted on some hacker sight on the Internet, complete with passwords, balances and credit limits? If TIA ever becomes reality, it will only be a matter of time before that happens. After all, government computers are known for having security that is much less capable than corporate America and we are talking about the "Holy Grail of Hackerdom".
This evil spawn of the Dubya administration must not only be cut out of ARDA, but be completely de-funded, so it won't pop up in some other obscure government agency. Furthermore, a man who was convicted of lying to Congress has no business running any government agency. By appointing convicted felon, Poindexter to that position, Dubya proved his lack of moral values.
And, quite frankly, the federal government does need to develop much better data mining technologies - although they should concentrate on their existing data stream before trying to go out and get more data.
I'm not in favor of TIA. And, FWIW, I've worked on large multi-terabyte marketing databases that are probably the closest thing to what TIA is trying to accomplish, so I do have a bit of expertise in the area as well. And something I've learned is that the solution to failure is not to do more of what is failing.
The government had the pieces of the puzzle to stop 9-11 - but they didn't put it all together. Why? Because of political and technical barriers that prevented the joining of disparate data into a picture of the unfolding plot. So IMO the government, instead of going out and acquiring petabytes of additional data, needs instead to examine why the existing information stream was not utilized - and probably three-quarters of the problems will be political and one-quarter technical. The political can take many forms, from data-sharing laws to political agendas to bias to just plain bureaucratic sloth - but those need to be broken down, studied and overcome, unless the laws blocking data sharing have a clear privacy purpose that should not be circumvented. Once those barriers are broken down, then technology can be applied and the data joined and pattern analysis applied. But technology will do no good until the political problems are overcome - and the technology might be something as simple as weekly conference calls between investigative liasons between departments.
Once the government demonstrates that it is using its existing data stream effectively, then it should make its case for adding more data - but the data has to have a clear purpose, tied to patterns of behavior observed in terrorism investigations - that would create the probable cause. However, just up and buying a bunch of data from Experian, Trans Union, Acxiom and D&B and mashing it together won't accomplish that. TIA as envisioned by Poindexter would have failed as a modeling tool, and without privacy protections it would have become a lookup database, with all the inherent dangers you have mentioned - but Poindexter foresaw the upcoming privacy objections and was planning to add to TIA a scrambling process for name information to where only a warrant could be used to get the actual name. Now, the system at ARDA doesn't even have that protection, and it should be stopped as well. But we should be careful not to hinder the process of getting the government to use its existing data in a more useful manner, and make sure that any activism is not undoing useful side projects such as the privacy aspect of TIA.
After all, during the DC sniper investigation, there were several entries for the Caprice in the database, but no one could figure out to run a SELECT COUNT(*) by license plate number, both through technical incompetence and because of Chief Moose's bias and insistence that they were looking for white males in a white van. We'll probably see similar blockages in the use of internal data by the feds, and those should be overcome.
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