I Have a Bone To Pick with GW Bush

[FormerLurker]

From Feds Open 'Total' Tech Spy System

By Eliot Borin

Had Winston Churchill been alive in the months subsequent to Sept. 11 he might well have described U.S. intelligence agencies' performance prior to the attack thusly: Never have so many known so much and done so little.

On Wednesday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will begin awarding contracts for the design and implementation of a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system.

It's a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures -- clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards -- and decode them prior to an assault. It's a task, the Information Awareness Office (IAO) says, that is beyond "our current intelligent infrastructure and other government agencies."

TIA program directors make it clear they also believe the task to be beyond current technology, noting that they are primarily interested in revolutionary advances in science, technology or systems and "development of collaboration, automation and cognitive aids technologies that allow humans and machines to think together about complicated and complex problems."

So insistent are they on building a better mousetrap -- or, more accurately, a brand new terrorist trap -- that they have officially warned potential contractors that not a dime will be invested in "research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to existing technology."

According to the IAO's blueprint, TIA's five-year goal is the "total reinvention of technologies for storing and accessing information ... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes."

It is precisely the thought of petabytes of raw data being under the control of an agency with limited public accountability that troubles civil liberties activists like Lee Tien, senior staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"We should resist the expansion of any 'data-veillance' program that doesn't have adequate safeguards and accountability," Tien says. "This program sounds like a counterpart of the movement toward requiring a national ID card. People like to think of that as an identification system, but it's actually a tracking system.

"The Total Information Awareness program, with its ability to provide persistent storage of everything from credit card, to employment, to medical, to ISP records, is a recipe for civil liberties disaster unless there are provisions for citizens to find out who is looking at their records and to see and correct those records."

"What I don't want to see is a system that's the worst of both worlds, unable to predict acts of terrorism in a timely manner because of the sheer mass of mostly irrelevant information clogging its channels, but perfectly attuned for intimate spying on regular citizens and activists like Martin Luther King."

Even in these early days, Tien's concerns have some resonance. Among the topics DARPA spokespersons would not discuss in connection with this article were the program's budget, whether the technology was being developed for deployment by an existing intelligence department or a new "super spy" agency, and which program elements the contracts being issued this month cover.

"This DARPA project sounds a lot like Spielberg's Minority Report premise of 'PreCrime,'" said security consultant and author Richard Forno, referring to the fictional law enforcement office that arrests folks before they commit a crime.

"I mean, I'm a geek, but my two degrees are in international relations. Does that mean if all of a sudden I start buying books on terrorism, bio-war or current affairs, I'm going to be labeled a potential bad guy?"

[Eva]

It is very difficult to fire Fed. union workers.

[Righty1]

I can't think of a single RAT I would trust with these powers.

[JusticeLives]

You said:

"Oh and BTW, they already have Orwellian survelliance, such as Echelon. Half of what Safire wrote is already going on even before GW. Did they ever shut down Carnivore?"

Arthur, I'm glad you brought this up. I believe both were up and running prior to 9/11 but don't know if this is true at present, but I think it's not likely to be pulled any time soon. I have a problem about the initial reaction to 9/11 by our armed services and airforce. It gives me the chills to think Did all those in command just sit there shocked for several hours paralyzed by fear? THAT'S not very comforting, because they're supposed to be our top dogs, and they failed us. No one made a move. Early on, no commentators mused about what our airforce was doing. Do you know if there's a no-fly zone over the Pentagon?

That said, I wonder why the BigEars tag-team didn't pick anything up on the pending 9/11 attack when, in fact, the BigEars got some face-time in print about its sp-eyeing on foreign corporations to get a jump on competitition. How come it works for some projects and not others viz good for foreign eavesdropping but not worth a crap domestically. I'd like to see some statistics on how many criminals the alphabet agencies have netted as a result of domestic sp-eyeing. I'll bet the percentage would be very very small. So, why do they need to sp-eye on law-abiding people? JL

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

How come it works for some projects and not others viz good for foreign eavesdropping but not worth a crap domestically.

The perverse part of Echelon is that we spy on our allies, while our allies spy on us. Then we share the info to each other.

We gave them the technology to spy on us. Why? Because it's unconstitutional for us to spy on ourselves. Bottom line: we have Canadians, Aussies, and Brits spying on us who might not be as gun-ho as we are about nabbing Islamic extremists. Rather, they might be looking for hot stock tips for all I know. The echelon system is completely insane. But it would take a constitutional amendment to do it any other way.

Like you said, in this current climate, unless we lose even more privacy than we already lost, we won't make any progress in personal privacy.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

And you believe EVERYTHING you see on TV? That's sort of naive, don't you think?

That NYT link backs up Safire. You are definitely on-the-ball. [Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans] But it's the NYT, LOL! When ABC gets Bush OUT of hot water, I don't know what to think. My 'truth' compass is spinning counter clockwise.

After Enron backfired in Clinton's face and the Cheney/Haliburton fiasco, I vowed to myself that if Bush looks like a demon, I should wait two weeks to see if he still has horns. I rashly I broke that vow. I feel like a sucker. So, I'm going to try to force myself to wait a week to see if he still has horns.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

The good thing is, it's an end run around concerns about racial/ethnic profiling. But it will home in the same way a police officer does, only better:

(3) can automatically queue analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks; and, (4) supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and prospective courses of action.

[steve50]

Not sure I want companies with 50% foreign ownership running Homeland Security probes. We had enough trouble with foreign spys after 911.

[taxed2death]

A few predators with IR sensors, flying back to back along the borders. It would be the quickest, most efficient way to do it. Beef up the number of BP officers, only to be dispatched when a "hit" has been registered by a predator.

If we can use all these neat toys to play games over in Trashkanistan, we can play with them at home too.

Internment camps for illegal trespassers, until we can identify them and then boot 'em in the ass back where they came from.

It would make an excellent jobs program in our sleepy little border towns.


Next!

[Democratic_Machiavelli]

Thanks for the info. Will be looking more into this info today.

[Democratic_Machiavelli]

Looked at the website a little more. Really liked the Babylon Project (rapid speech translation) and Bio-surveillance (biological agent detection).

The only thing that's frightened me (so far) in that website is the centralization of information concerning individuals. It smacks too much of Nazi beaurocracy. Combined with the Human ID program (which seems to be a good thing all by itself), this could do some serious evil in the wrong hands (think Hillary or Algore).

[Democratic_Machiavelli]

He wouldn't just lose the Hispanic vote (which mostly votes Democratic anyway). He would lose the so-called "elite" vote. I've seen who cuts the lawns of the "elite" and washes their dishes. Most of the people at fast food places are usually immigrants. There are places here where huge amounts of Hispanics wait for jobs. By the middle of the day, few are left standing around. Trucks come by in the morning and pick up whoever is willing to work.

Our economy at this point is built on illegal labor. Sealing the borders would destroy our economy because citizen labor costs too much. I can post more info on this if you like.

[Democratic_Machiavelli]

:D

[Democratic_Machiavelli]

Very good point. I wonder if this will be part of the military outsourcing that will occur soon (it's starting with the Army).

Putting corporations in charge of this would be very smart. They already track individuals as it is and are very good at it. :( Have a group contracted with gathering the information, then download into a government owned database. Easy.

[Democratic_Machiavelli]

From what I understand, it isn't illegal...just highly, strongly, vehemently discouraged.

[Democratic_Machiavelli]

As quickly as technology is advancing in the private sector (I'm thinking quantum computing here), it's becoming more realistic every day.

[Democratic_Machiavelli]

I can see why they would think it's a good idea. Forced immunizations were what "eradicated" smallpox to begin with.

[Democratic_Machiavelli]

But Bush has allowed them to stay in their positions. From what I understand, he could have let them go when he took office and could even let them go at this very moment.

[jocon307]

"Perhaps the troops could be replaced eventually with a wall. I personally would not mind using lots of hounds as well"

The land borders are not the only problem. Remember the Hatian waders? And there are wide open borders everywhere there is an international airport. World wide people are willing not only to break our laws, but risk their own lives to get here, because they KNOW that once in, their chances of living here unmolested are excellent. I used to be a big proponent of immigration. That ended at 9:30 am 9/11/01. I know that most people who come here are law abiding and hard working. We need an immigration moratorium NOW! But I'm afraid that since this wasn't done by 9:20 am 9/12/01 it may never be done. That is, it may not be done unless we the people push for it. For all we bemoan the liberal media, etc. the American people are still running the show here. Public opinion changes things for good or ill. I predict that immigration becomes the Next Big Political Issue, and my beloved "W" better get on the right side of the argument. Right now he's ignoring it, and hoping we do the same; but I don't think that can work for very long. And for all the perceived left leaning bias of the media (which is true)they are helping Bush by helping to ignore the immigration status of illegal immigrants who are terrorists, such as the guy who shot up LAX and Master Malvo. But, we must get active on this, and I admit, I'm not sure what to do.

[FormerLurker]

Technically, the TIA program is focusing on the development of: 1) architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database, for system elements associated with database population, and for integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools; 2) novel methods for populating the database from existing sources, create innovative new sources, and invent new algorithms for mining, combining, and refining information for subsequent inclusion into the database; and, 3) revolutionary new models, algorithms, methods, tools, and techniques for analyzing and correlating information in the database to derive actionable intelligence.

The fact is, this WILL be a database of EVERY possible data element pertaining to US CITIZENS. It is exactly as described by Safire, and is a threat to privacy and freedom.

It will automatically trigger "actions" when certain events occur, such as a credit card transaction, a sequence of purchases, or simply visiting certain websites.

We are a free people should vehemently oppose such intrusions into our private lives. Terrorists will just bypass any of these measures by using false indentities, it will be regular US citizens that'll be under scrutiny with this Orweillian system.