U.S. developing technology to warn of terror plots (more on Total Information Awareness Program)

The United States is developing new technologies to monitor communications and alert authorities instantly to words or phrases that might reflect an insurgency plot. The Defense Department is funding a project designed to search vast quantities of data to determine links and patterns that could indicate terrorist activities.

The project, called the Total Information Awareness System, seeks to develop a prototype to rapidly translate all languages, form links between current activities and future insurgency attacks and provide the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities with a basis for cooperation and joint analysis.

Defense Undersecretary Edward Aldridge, responsible for acquisition, technology and logistics, said the project is being developed by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA).

The program contains three parts. The first is to research technologies for rapid language translation. The second is to discover connections between current activities and future events. The third part seeks to provide what Aldridge terms "collaborative reasoning and decision-making tools to allow interagency communications and analysis."

"In order to preserve the sanctity of individual privacy, we're designing this system to ensure complete anonymity of uninvolved citizens, thus focusing the efforts of law enforcement officials on terrorist investigations," Aldridge told a Pentagon briefing last month.

Critics have warned that such a project could allow the government to monitor ordinary citizens at all times. This could include tracking everything from passport and visa applications to credit card purchases.

But Aldridge said officials would only examine data that would indicate a terrorist plot. He drew a scenario in which the system would detect an individual purchasing a large amount of chemicals that could produce a bomb and then rent a car near a major metropolitan area. At that point, he said, the system would alert authorities to investigate.

The Pentagon has proposed that Rear Adm. John Poindexter lead the program. During the 1980s, Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress and destroying documents during the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal. The conviction was overturned on appeal.

"What John Poindexter is doing is developing a tool. He's not exercising that tool; he will not exercise that tool," Aldridge said. "That tool will be exercised by the intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement agencies. "It is absurd to think that DARPA is somehow trying to become another police agency."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld agreed. He said DARPA helped develop the Internet at a time when few understood its value.

"What is going on in DARPA today is exactly that kind of activity," Rumsfeld said. "You've got a bunch of very talented people working internally, dealing with a lot of talented people outside the institution, taking some small fraction of the taxpayers money, investing it and to see if we can't find ways to do things better."

I think this is a more accurate description of the TIA program, than some we have read before.

This is the DARPA site of the program: http://www.darpa.mil/iao/index.htm

There are hundreds of terrorist sites on the web, in plain view, spouting vast quantities of murderous rhetoric and all hosted by U.S. ISPs and the government doesn't do anything about it.

I can't help but be a worried that some AI program searching for 'patterns' is going to get it all wrong.

JohnathanRGalt: There are hundreds of terrorist sites on the web, in plain view, spouting vast quantities of murderous rhetoric and all hosted by U.S. ISPs and the government doesn't do anything about it.

I can't help but be a worried that some AI program searching for 'patterns' is going to get it all wrong.

I think the government is allowing those sites to operate so they can track them and collect intelligence, hopefully.
I know what you mean about searching for key words and patterns. I read that before the 9-11 bombings they referred to the attacks as "weddings" and they use very innocous sounding code names, which is hard to pick out of the millions of electronic transmissions of people really talking about such events. But I think that is part of the purpose of the DARPA program, to try to take all that into account and see if there are some triggers, which combined with other info, would form a good enough screen, to detect the terrorists.

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