Business

A programme to monitor terrorists links

The Terrorism Information Awareness arms the Government with a more powerful arsenal for personal intrusion without due process of law.

THE U.S. Government mooted the "Terrorism Information Awareness'' (TIA) programme in 2002 as "Total Information awareness.'' The "Information Awareness Office (IAO)'' was implementing TIA under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). TIA aims to develop technology for consolidating and searching vast amounts of personal and other data commandeered from diverse sources and to determine links and patterns therein indicative of suspect terrorist activities.

From the beginning, TIA has been mired in controversies. With passions running high, nobody seems to be sincere about finding a balance between safety and liberty. Unfortunately, public distrust of politicians, bureaucrats and commercial organisations seems to stoke prejudices against the TIA.

Many believe that liberty is too precious to be compromised, by mega databases and statistical algorithms judging qualitative and complex human and social attributes.

A free society should prevent mere statistics from wrongly accusing even one in a million. Where a search without a warrant is prohibited, the TIA arms the Government with a more powerful arsenal for personal intrusion without due process of law. Fear of abuse of the TIA to stifle genuine dissent has been widespread. Many dread the prospect of such information falling into the hands of the very terrorists the TIA targets. After all government computers have been hacked many times over.

Organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) (www.aclu.org) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) (www.eff.org) have been opposing the TIA tooth and nail. They are afraid that the U.S. may become an Orwellian Oceania, post TIA.

Under public pressure, the U.S. Congress stopped further funding of the TIA in September 2003 and closed the IAO. But the EFF feels that, the Congress resolution de-funding the TIA is deceptive. (http://www.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/20031003_comments.php). The Congress exempts "counter-terrorism foreign-intelligence'' targeting foreign nationals. It has allowed many TIA projects under other "classified'' budgets beyond public scrutiny. "Democracy Now'' of March6, 2004 says that the TIA does continue under different banners. (http://www.democracynow.org/ article.pl?sid=04/06/03/142239).

Information in public domain about the TIA is limited. Inter alia, the following projects appear to be under TIA sponsorship. Most of these are "Dataveillance" type of projects. Visit (http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/CACM88.html) for the classic 1988 treatise of Dataveillance by Roger Clarke, the man who coined the term.

Bio-ALIRT

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su5301a29.htm explains what is Bio-ALIRT. "It monitors symptoms of patients at emergency rooms and doctors' offices and such less-obvious sources as increases in grocery store orange juice sales and in-school absenteeism in hopes of detecting a biological attack.'' MSN reported on March 14.2004 that the privacy protection part of Bio-ALIRT is still awaiting field trials for want of payment by DARPA. (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4533970). It is felt that diseases and personal habits may no longer remain private affairs.

War gaming the asymmetric environment and RAPID analytic war gaming aim to "identify predictive indicators by examining individual and group behaviour in broad environmental context'' for "predicting terrorist attacks.'' (http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title= Total_Information_Awareness).

They may use "Social Network Theory'' to study "mappings'' between individuals to evaluate the "social capital'' of the selected individual. "Social Capital'' roughly refers to an individual's social networking potential.

They may be trying to map and study the relationships of individuals statistically for action plans, which may affect the lives and liberty of living humans.

MATRIX

"Multi State Anti Terrorism Information Exchange'' seeks to gather and analyse personal information for assigning "Terrorist Factor'' scores to target individuals.

In demonstrations, Seisint, the company, which designed MATRIX, is stated to have "produced a list of 120,000 people with high terrorist factor scores from public and private records covering ethnicity, age, gender and proximity to dirty address.''

"Daily Wireless'' sarcastically reported that this list included five of the eleven 9/11 hijackers. (http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.php?name= News&file= article&sid=2549). Washington Post reported that MATRIX "would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event.'' (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21872-2003Aug5?language=printer). This is one of the TIA projects where the Federal Government is stated to subsidise state governments for pooling their databases on U.S. citizens for the "Prevention of Crime.''

EELD

"Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery'' seeks to extract "data and relationships about people, organisations, and activities from message traffic and open source data.'' (http://www.infowar.net/tia/ www.darpa.mil/iao/EELD.htm).

It seeks to target "asymmetric threats by loosely organised groups.'' These new threats "have a smaller mass, exhibit fewer observables... Sparse activity that was once too insignificant to notice, needs to be identified, correlated, expanded, and evaluated. Patterns of activity that, in isolation, are of limited significance but, when combined, are indicative of potential threats.'' (http://www.rl.af.mil/ tech/ programs/eeld/). Civil Liberties advocates call this a roving enquiry of massive commonplace data to brand someone a terrorist.

FutureMAP

FutureMap intends to "concentrate on market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events.'' It will analyse data from the world's economy in an attempt to predict political instability, threats to national security, and in general every major event in the near future.

Genoa II

Genoa II seeks to automate team processes. It assists teams of intelligence analysts and policy personnel to create more hypotheses, build and populate more models and enables "faster, smarter, and more joint day-to-day operations.''

Genisys is a specialised database management system, "better than RDBMS,'' with a simpler query language and stores "data in context of time and space to help resolve uncertainty that always exists in data, but is not modelled today.''

"Carnivore'' and "Magic Lantern'' may be used along with tools like EELD. Carnivore can be connected to an ISP network to intercept and record digital communications. It can be remotely accessed by a dial-up link. Magic Lantern is a keylogging software to capture keystrokes from inside a target computer. It is a combination computer worm/Trojan horse. Keylogging can assist enormously in breaking encryption algorithms. (http:// www. stanford. edu/dalmassi/CS201/ magic_lantern.html). ECHELON attempts to capture staggering volumes of satellite, microwave, cellular and fibre-optic traffic.

EARS Effective, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-text can transcribe telephone conversations, meetings etc. in real time. TIDES aims to detect, translate, summarize, and extract information in speech or text in multiple languages.

Human ID seeks to develop tools to mark and study individuals from great distances, for example, from a satellite.

R. Mohanakrishnan

He can be contacted at rsmk@touchtelindia.net

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