Posted on 11/09/2002 9:31:25 AM PST by rs79bm
By JOHN MARKOFF
he Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe — including the United States.
As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.
Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.
Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.
"We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options," he said in a speech in California earlier this year.
Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.
The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil liberties proponents.
"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been briefed on the project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a lunch to discuss it, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
"As part of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a variety of organizations, to include the law enforcement community," a Pentagon spokeswoman said.
An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the Pentagon about the project but that no final decision had been made about what information the F.B.I. might add to the system.
A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, Gordon Johndroe, said officials in the office were not familiar with the computer project and he declined to discuss concerns raised by the project's critics without knowing more about it.
He referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials said they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too were not familiar enough with the project.
Some members of a panel of computer scientists and policy experts who were asked by the Pentagon to review the privacy implications this summer said terrorists might find ways to avoid detection and that the system might be easily abused.
"A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."
Other technology policy experts dispute that assessment and support Admiral Poindexter's position that linking of databases is necessary to track potential enemies operating inside the United States.
"They're conceptualizing the problem in the way we've suggested it needs to be understood," said Philip Zelikow, a historian who is executive director of the Markle Foundation task force on National Security in the Information Age. "They have a pretty good vision of the need to make the tradeoffs in favor of more sharing and openness."
On Wednesday morning, the panel reported its findings to Dr. Tony Tether, the director of the defense research agency, urging development of technologies to protect privacy as well as surveillance, according to several people who attended the meeting.
If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.
The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern recognition techniques known as "data mining," a set of statistical techniques used by scientists as well as by marketers searching for potential customers.
The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, all from their individual computers.
The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test data that would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system would be put into operation.
The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the government to lash together both commercial and government data to hunt for patterns of terrorist activities.
"What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts," said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.
Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case.
What Is P2P...And What Isn't
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:y5UHD8Jv2xkC:www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/11/24/shirky1-whatisp2p.html+peer+to+peer+system&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Not being a techie, I don't pretend to understand this in any detail--but at least this one is written in English :)
'Recycled' refugees swindle UN of millions
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/786204/posts?
It won't be long before they find an excuse to have the whole world scanned...all in the name of preventing fraud.
And after Americans applaud this move by the UN against the Afghanis, how will they justify refusing to be scanned themselves?
Congress is working on legislation REQUIRING states to record such information in relation to driver's licenses.
Simply put, it's when two computers communicate directly with each other. With a web browser, there are MANY computers acting as clients that are communicating with the web server. Peer-to-peer is a more of a one to one relationship, with the two computers acting as both client AND server. Napster is an example of a peer-to-peer system, although it is an example of a many-to-many relationship.
For more info, click the link below..
What OS are you using, and how is it configured? If it isn't one that enforces an access control list with specific permissions for specific users on specific folders (read: Windows 9x), or if you do not use access controls to restrict remote users to accessing only those specific folders you're sharing via Napster on a read-only basis, then you're basically hanging the "Come One, Come All" sign out.
I have no problem with this concept if there is a built-in death penalty, non-negotiable and automatic, for anyone in or out of government abusing the system or the data.
Does anyone have a problem with that?
You're welcome. It's hard to fathom this coming about, as it DOES appear to indicate a march towards a "1984" type of society.
It seems to be inevitable in our current situation. Freedom only works in a basically moral, Judeo-Christian society.
Thanks to the open borders and the rapid influx of immigrants (both legal and illegal), we now have Balkanization and no concensus whatsoever over values and morals. As a result, the government has chosen to monitor everyone to avoid the appearance of discrimination and more infighting in government agencies...
It appears that has been the goal all along. Why else flood our land with those who are only here to reap those benefits that we have as a Nation worked and fought hard and for, where many of our fathers before us fought in wars and made the ultimate sacrifice in order to safegaurd our way of life? H1-B workers have no great love for this country nor it's People. Many are openly hostile to Americans, and could care less about the Principles this Nation was founded upon. They were raised to love THEIR country, not ours.
The immigration policies we have today invites terrorists into our country. It is only a matter of time before something else happens, only reinforcing the notion that we NEED restrictions on our basic freedoms in order to prevent another terrorist act...
Will you agree that *if* the information in the article is accurate, then this massive surveillance system should be opposed?
Of course, I'd assume that anyone who posts on FR is under surveilance...
Although you are correct, there's several unnamed Pentagon sources, the blurbs that relate to them are irrelevant in relation to the accurary of this article. They are simply fluff.
Private data that requires a warrant to access will still need a warrant to collect in a database and for searches. If you can prove differently, then you've got a story to tell
Well, you do know that information that was supposed to be discarded in relation to "instant checks" by LAW IS still being held and utilized, right?
Court to Hear Gun Info Privacy Case
Now if they can violate the law there, who's to say they won't do it with the TIA system?
I may be mistaken, but I believe warrants are not used now to access Internet mail through government servers.
Refer to post 116 for info on THAT...
Also if I'm not mistaken, the internet was invented under DARPA(with no help from Gore) and the backbone is still not privatized.
Yep, BBN under DARPA developed the concepts and protocols for the Internet, which was originally named ARPANET. And of course, the government can pull a few tricks with it if and when it'd like to...
Also, who owns the internet backbone, the devices of which our e-mail passes??
Various companies, including BBN and Sprint.
Regards!
Regards back to you.
Any information in this article that turns out to be true *and* is a violation of the following must be opposed.
Amendment V -- "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."
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