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Total Information Awareness, Disguised And Alive
unassimilatible writes "According to the AP, aspects of the controversial Total Information Awareness DARPA program, officially shut down by the U.S. Congress in September 2003 after a public outcry, seem to have survived. The article reports, 'Some projects from retired Adm. John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness effort were transferred to U.S. intelligence offices, congressional, federal and research officials told The Associated Press. In addition, Congress left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA, that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter's program.'"
See what acronyms can do to you. MWEAC, OSIS, MISSI, hell some of their own don't even know what exists or even what they do. Again, I thank John Asscroft and his Patriot Act, all under the gimmick of the pork barrel Department of Homeland Insignificance. Now, obviously this sound trollish but it is not, most people here click by things without looking into things. Sort of like the way stories are read here, a quick glimpse, and that's that.
For those interested in what is going on in government behind the scenes, don't always think people who post the kinds of things I post are all conspiratorial stories aimed at bringing down government through chaos. Hell look at sites like FAS, Cryptome, Arms Control, and the multitude of others. Many people point things out but too many are concerned with menial things such as Janet's boobs, Sex and the Shitty, etc., to notice the rug being pulled from under them. Hell most Americans think CNN and Fox are the holy grail of news. Get out there and read, know what's happening in your country. Check out BBC, Observer, Greg Palast, AntiWar, Chomsky. These people aren't being controlled via advertisers, not political pressure. I write sometimes too kooky assed documents, that some might say aren't worth a pot to piss in. Maybe so, but there is a reason for me rambling on like a madman sometimes. I care about my privacy and liberty. I don't want my friends or family growing up in something out of "Escape from Alcatraz"
MoFscker
Yes, because we know an organization composed of crypto-geeks and engineers is completely equipped to make you disappear.
NSA's not in the business of making people disappear. The program is public. Do you think they make every concerned citizen disappear? Please. Don't take movies as documentaries.
In fact, NSA tends to be one of the more non-threatening agencies when it comes to dealing with protestors. Remember the infamous tea party, when they just met the protestors at the fence, gave them some tea, and asked them about any specific issues they had? They're not quite that loose anymore, but I'd really be more concerned with Homeland Security than NSA.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
How about that US CITIZEN that is currently being held with out trial and who has been denied a lawyer?
Mark Maybury, MITRE (Chair), maybury@mitre.org
Karen Sparck Jones, University of Cambridge, sparckjones@cl.cam.ac.uk
Ellen Voorhees, NIST, ellen.voorhees@nist.gov
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas at Austin, sanda@cs.utexas.edu
Liz Liddy, University of Syracuse, liddy@syr.edu
John Prange, ARDA, jprange@nsa.gov
ARDA workshops. And for your non Americans, if you think it's limited to us... Have I got news for you! They'll be snooping around the mountains when you come... They'll be snooping around the mountains... they'll be snooping around the mountains...
MoFscker
5th:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
6th:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
[wikipedia.org]
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
Interesting who the research money was going to. Lenat's Cycorp is well-known in the AI community as a black hole into which vast sums of money are poured with no useful results.
On the other hand, Craig Knoblock, whose name was horribly misspelled in the article, is a first class AI researcher. His current work looks like it would be useful outside the context of TIA.
All in all, it looks like the usual story: well-known names in the AI community being supported by money from wherever in the convoluted entrails of the US Federal Govt money comes from. If TIA is defunded, they need new grants to keep working. Don't know that it all means much.
The scenarios you list may aid in tracking down a known terrorist, but without prior knowledge that can be effectively inserted into the data mining algorithm neither scenario will discover novel information about unkown terrorist rings.
Consider that there are approximately 300 million people in the united states. At 10 phone calls a day for 365 days you get 1 trillion phone calls per year. Suppose I have 100 known terrorists telephone activity for 6 months, and I want to find similar patterns in the remainder of my data to identify other terrorist rings. That means I have 100*10*365/2 = 182,500 training examples. I.e., 200k / 1,000,000,000k ~= two millionths of a percent of my data for training a predictive model is labeled as positive for terrorist activity. Even with an amazingly accurate algorithm, this will lead to hundreds of thousands of false positives and a few true positives, for no net gain of actionable information. Certainly you can narrow these results by orders of magnitude through very intensive effort, but the margin will not be overcome.
To track down known terrorists can't the data be requested on an as-needed basis through the courts?
I think everyone on Slashdot called this one last July.
Basically, the funding bill that supposedly "killed" TIA only banned funding for the program called "Terrorism Information Awareness." It's a gaping legal loophole that seems to have been written in a piss-poor attempt at reassuring Joe and Jane CNN Viewer that the good government really had no intention to spy on them for subversive activities, no-siree.
I'm not surprised the obvious result is taking place. I am surprised that someone in a newsroom somewhere thought to follow up on the fate of TIA-related research.
Remember: It's not paranoia if they're really watching you.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
People are very confused on what and who DARPA is. I have worked on a few DARPA projects and this is how it normally goes.
DARPA is only concerned with research. Not production or use.
On the couple of DARPA programs I worked on it goes like this.
1.) DARPA gets a crazy idea (like "I wonder if we can make an anti-gravity device".)
2.) DARPA puts together about 6 to 10 teams of researchers (from industry and academia) and gives them some money to study the problem.
3.) 6 months or so later the teams present their ideas to DARPA. DARPA then decides if it wants to stop the research or continue.
4.) If DARPA continues. It will pick the best 2 or 3 approaches and give those teams more money for more details on their approach.
5.) 6 months or so later the teams present their approaches to DARPA. If DARPA really likes an idea, it might have one of the teams build a small prototype.
If the prototype works out DARPA will ask congress to take the research to production (not under DARPA but under DOD).
Very, very rarely does a DARPA project make it to production.
High Risk as in 'Public Backlash'?
High Risk as in it's not likely they'll be able to make it work, but it'll be Really Cool (in their opinion) if they can.
Jose Padilla, a.k.a. Abdullah al-Muhajir, supposedly plotted to build and detonate a radiological "dirty bomb." He is a U.S. citizen. Yet he's being detained by the military -- indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn't been charged with any crime. Yaser Esam Hamdi is also a U.S. citizen. He, too, is being detained by the military -- indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn't been charged with any crime. Meanwhile, Zacarias Moussaoui, purportedly the 20th hijacker, is not a U.S. citizen. Neither is Richard Reid, the alleged shoe bomber. Both have attorneys. Both have been charged before federal civilian courts.
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Please read my post above.
The Republicans have never been about keeping government out of your life. Whether the subject is obscenity, abortion, "family values", or smoking pot, the Republicans have been there to offer legislation to regulate the minutia of your behavior. They do claim to be all about reducing government, and they do talk about reducing taxes, but it has been the Republicans that have obscenely increased government spending since Nixon, and it has been the Republicans who have proposed new powers for federal, state, and local law enforcement that infringe upon our first and fourth amendment rights, and it has been the Republicans who have bypassed US laws (proposed by Republicans) to support foreign terrorists and dictators (Including Osama Bin-Laden, Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinoche, Francios and Jean-Claude Duvalier, Manuel Noriega, Anastasio Samoza, Alfredo Cristiani, Mobuto Sese Seko, Samuel Doe, P.W. Botha, etc, etc, etc,) and murdered democratically elected leaders of other countries (Patrice Lumumba) incited coups against Democratic governments (Chile in 1973, Congo in 1964, Liberia in 1980, and a failed coup attempt in Venezuela this past April).
Many Americans choose to be ignorant this historical record because of the Republicans talk of lowering taxes, in spite of the obvious connection between increased government spending and a need for increased revenues.
Many Americans are aware of the historical record, are aware of the continuing illegal activities of our intelligence agencies (both abroad and at home), yet they choose to act as if blind to these things, will argue in favor of these actions, and will contrive to make life difficult of anyone who dare speak of them (if you do not produce documentation you are "crazy", if you do produce documentation then you are "dangerous").
TIA and ARDA are little more than our intelligence agencies and the current Republican administration conspiring to behave a bit more like the dictators they have traditionally backed. The intelligence agencies and the industries that are supported by them would like to see a return to the more lucrative days of the Cold War. They feel they are under threat as more and more people are scrutinizing their history using collections of documents released by the Freedom of Information Act, like those at the National Security Archive, EPIC.org, the Federation of American Scientists, the EFF, and probably more that I am unaware of.
Read this stuff, it is an amazing way to gain insight into the hidden workings of our government. Read about "the Church Commission to learn how the CIA breaks the law, hires the mob, and manipulates the media while harassing and murdering US citizens that they beleive hold "un-American beleifs". Read about the Iran-Contra affair to learn how little respect for the law our current Administration's Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Poindexter (among others) really have, and read about the cocaine importing that they participated in to fund their pet terrorists.
The current mood seems to support giving our Federal Law Enforcement and Intelligence agencies increased freedoms to invade our privacy while reducing oversight of their actions in hopes that this will increase national security and make our lives a little safer. The problem is that when you look at the record of their history, it appears that the opposite is much more likely to result, and that allowing the FBI and CIA increased freedom and power, might just end the
Read, L
The US government was informed immediately by the Indian government but didn't care to listen to the details of how he also skipped the Dehli-Paris leg already, was a regular, legitimate traveler, and most important, had a name that simply is as common in that part of the world as "John Smith" is in the US, and which to an ignorant desk-jockey in Washington thought sounded like a name used by a terrorist.
In others words: the whole Christmas "terrorist alert" was a crock caused by moronic goverment incompetence, at best.