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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.'"
in government, shoot for the moon and keep what you can if someone gets a nose on it. This happens all the time and is one of the reasons the federal budget is so large, departments ask for more than they really need and keep what they get.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
ARDA's mission is to sponsor high-risk high-payoff research designed to leverage leading edge technology in the solution of some of the most critical poblems facing the intelligence community (IC).
High Risk as in 'Public Backlash'?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
am I not even remotely surprised by this announcement ?
Could anyone actually trust a government that passed the PATRIOT Act to actually can TIA ?
We tell them no, then they break it in to a bunch of pieces and do it anyway.
Why do we keep electing these people who keep misrepresenting us to represent us?
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
"The whole congressional action looks like a shell game," said Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. "There may be enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical work is continuing."
So most of the projects continue, but under a different name. And this time I am sure they will be much better hidden from the public eye. 1984 anybody?
more about me
will this (public outcry) also pushes more privacy-invading systems being developed and used in the dark?
now that they knew public doesn't like the idea of such thing, why bother asking in the future? just go ahead and do it.
I don't think treating americans diffrently based on where they are in the world is a good precident to set....
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
No bad idea ever goes away.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
...is about twenty years overdue for revolution. ... events critical to national security ... such as those of Sept. 11, 2001,"
From the article:
"to help the nation avoid strategic surprise
This kind of reasoning to destroy rights is sick. What does that mean, "such as those"? Where are all these 'terrorists' (sick of THAT word) who wait to waylay me and bugger me bloody?
Ooooh, that's right! The New & Imroved ARDA is protecting me from them. Thanks for that.
BTW. Not believing privacy is my right
MEANS NOTHING TO ME. I'll still claim I have that right, and fight for every inch of it.
_____ "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- Orwell
It just amazes me that the repulicans are all about government staying out of our lives but they produce so much legislation the interferes with our lives. I think that it is time for king George the second to reread the bill of rights or maybe its time for us to fight the revolutionary war again.
I've been searchin for the chord I can't hear Ive been searchin for years Its somewhere inside But its well disguised
Many government agencies have been struggling to pay catch up when it comes to the "Information Revolution". Now a decade after the revolution began some are starting to realize the potential. It's been pretty embarassing to sit at your desk in the CIA and not be able to do a Google Search. I believe that the "total information awareness" program is simply a way to try and rectify this.
The tools are only going to get better, and the more laws and policies that allow the "leakage" of personal information will only make "privacy" a state of mind as opposed to something you actually have. If congress was so concerned about privacy perhaps they would rethink the Patriot Act, or other invasive police policies that have been en vogue for the last decade.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
The government isn't really spying on you, per se. They are taking all the public information out there, and data mining it to potentially flag and catch criminals and terrorists.
The crowd here turn into luddites as soon as technology is used by the government, but I think this is a great use for it. The 9/11 hijackers were in plain view, but because of the different agencies and bureaucracies, they fell through. This could be a tool to find the next 9/11 and I am all for it.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
Americans are free to leave (see Johnny Depp). I believe East Germans were shot in the back if they attempted to leave.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Use these 100,000 measurements of 10 known varibles and outcomes to build a model to predict unkown outcomes for new variables.
DARPA and ARDA's goal of predicting terrorist behavior, or will fail due to a paucity of observed terrorist behavior, an inability to precisely define the objective and an enormous amount of poorly collected, noisy and irrelevant data.
If you only read a few sentences from this article, read these:
[quote]
Ted Senator, who managed that research for Poindexter, told government contractors that mining data to identify terrorists "is much harder than simply finding needles in a haystack."
"Our task is akin to finding dangerous groups of needles hidden in stacks of needle pieces," he said. "We must track all the needle pieces all of the time."
[/quote]
This would be where the "Total" part of "Toal Information Awareness" comes in.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
Crazy as it sounds with our current culture, history tells us that is exactly what we have to do.
Having democratic elections creates the illusion of that process, but unless the organisations that operate under the government get shuffled as well, then nothing much actually changes. Something tells me that overthrowing the CIA, NSA, FBI, Army, Navy, Airforce, etc, etc isn't going to be easy...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Of course everyone is going to be weary of the government doing stuff like this. Mostly because the government has abused power like this in the past for political gains. Who's to say the people running the government won't (or haven't) do it again with this kind of information.
This could be a tool to find the next 9/11 and I am all for it.
If you really want to see the next 9/11 stopped, start with foreign policy.
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
What is Pointdexter doing running government programs anyway. He and North both ought to be in jail.
Just as it's illegal for the feds to go through every home in america looking for a criminal, it should be (is?) illegal for them to search through private information about me without reasonable cause to suspect me.
Furthermore, the government's paranoia about terrorists will make it illegal to look like a terrorist to this list. If you refuse to give your SS#, you look bad to the list. If you refuse to show ID, you look bad to the list. It doesn't matter that your SS# is supposed to be privately used only for purposes of social security, and it doesn't matter that you can't be forced to show ID unless you are suspected of a crime. What looks bad to the list will become a crime.
I hate this idea because it will imiplicate and punish innocent people for matching the trends of guilty ones. Furthermore, the people said "NO!" to this once, and it's disgusting that our government forces its will over that of the people.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I cannot agree that US government data mining is necessarily ineffective.
US gov TLAs with access to certain types of data alone have phenomenally clean and good data to use for data mining. For starters:
* Phone calls. Forget *contents* of phone calls -- a cop doesn't even need a warrant to get a list of phone calls. Plug all phone calls into a nice big database, and you have an excellent association network -- I can build up a list of all the people you know.
Now, suppose I want to detect flow of causuality. I look for some degree of correlation between a phone call from entity A to entity B and entity B to entity C. If a phone call of the second type follows a phone call of the first type within a day or two more than, say, 25% of the time, there's an interesting link to explore. Maybe entity B is passing on instructions to entity C. I'm not sure what the status of past location data is -- whether a warrant is required for telcos to turn over the data they've logged on your movements. Given a couple of years of accurate movement data, it's probably really interesting when a phone call from entity A to entity B is frequently followed by a physical visit from entity B to entity C.
* Purchasing-related data. Movements can be tracked via ATM withdrawals, credit-card use, phone card use, store purchasing card use. You ever let a friend use your store grocery card? That's a great source of determining who knows who -- a store card associated with two credit cards.
When you get a driver's license, most states fingerprint you (or at least thumbprint). I didn't even know that I *could* opt out of the thumbprint until afterwards.
I agree that mining is probably less useful to find terrorists (frankly, unless a terrorist is just incredibly stupid, he's going to avoid the above), but it *is* useful to track all kinds of other people.
Any person with a cell phone should have no expectation of privacy. They're carrying around a portable tracking device with a microphone that can be turned on remotely. End of story.
May we never see th
When you have a crimial organization the size of the US Government, they will do as they please.
If it fails here, they'll wack it. Sure.
It will pop up there, and if uproar continues, they'll wack it there.
It will pop up over there, under security this time, and if it leaks and there's more uproar, they'll wack it again. With "feeling".
But, once told "no", only criminals will find another way. And the Feds have so very many options.
They'll move it into "private research" inside Lockheed.
Or, they'll bust it up into dozens of subject matter and time compartmentalized graduate projects in their Universities.
Or, or, or...
Seems real terrorists just won't allow themselves to be stopped.
Could anyone actually trust the US government at all.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
For a program like TIA to work, first we have to tell the people that we have chosen not to implement it. No surprise here.
Yes it does. The exec branch made the decision to detain an US citizens and ignored their oaths. What makes you think they will do what they should in regards to the USA PATRIOT act?
... when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Congress
---------------------
July 1, 2002
Citizen Padilla: Dangerous Precedents
by Robert A. Levy
Robert A. Levy is senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.
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.
What gives? Four men: two citizens and two non-citizens. Is it possible that constitutional rights -- like habeas corpus, which requires the government to justify continued detentions, and the Sixth Amendment, which assures a speedy and public jury trial with assistance of counsel -- can be denied to citizens yet extended to non-citizens? That's what the Bush administration would have us believe. Citizen Padilla's treatment is perfectly legitimate, insists Attorney General John Ashcroft, because Padilla is an "enemy combatant" and there is "clear Supreme Court precedent" to handle those persons differently, even if they are citizens.
Ashcroft's so-called clear precedent is a 1942 Supreme Court case, Ex Parte Quirin, which dealt with Nazi saboteurs, at least one of whom was a U.S. citizen. "Enemy combatants," said the Court, are either lawful -- for example, the regular army of a belligerent country -- or unlawful -- for example, terrorists. When lawful combatants are captured, they are POWs. As POWs, they cannot be tried (except for war crimes), they must be repatriated after hostilities are over, and they only have to provide their name, rank, and serial number if interrogated. Clearly, that's not what the Justice Department has in mind for Padilla.
Unlawful combatants are different. When unlawful combatants are captured, they can be tried by a military tribunal. That's what happened to the Nazi saboteurs in Quirin. But Padilla has not been charged much less tried. Indeed, the president's executive order of November 2001 excludes U.S. citizens from the purview of military tribunals. If the president were to modify his order, the Quirin decision might provide legal authority for the military to try Padilla. But the decision provides no legal authority for detaining a citizen without an attorney solely for purposes of aggressive interrogation.
Moreover, the Constitution does not distinguish between the protections extended to ordinary citizens on one hand and unlawful-combatant citizens on the other. Nor does the Constitution distinguish between the crimes covered by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments and the terrorist acts Padilla is suspected of planning. Still, the Quirin Court justified those distinctions -- noting that Congress had formally declared war and thereby invoked articles of war that expressly authorized the trial of unlawful combatants by military tribunal. Today, the situation is very different. We've had virtually no input from Congress: no declaration of war, no authorization of tribunals, and no suspension of habeas corpus.
Yet those functions are explicitly assigned to Congress by Article I of the Constitution. It is Congress, not the executive branch, which has the power "To declare War" and "To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court." Only Congress can suspend the "Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus
"I seriously wonder how long before we have another civil war. There is already civil unrest. We have it too good right now to take up arms...but I wonder if it will happen within my lifetime. "
The USA is a wonderful place to live. It would take a catastrophic set of events along with nobody trying to fix them in order to cause people to fight the government. Frankly, with 300 million people in this country, the chances of that are VERY low, even if we were to look towards 2050.
For a civil war to happen, the bads have to outweigh the goods we have. We take them for granted, but we have a LOT to be thankful for here.
"Derp de derp."
The AP is a powerful media organization, agreed, but Slashdot?? Despite its tremendous power to bring down powerful web servers with one simple post, Slashdot does not reach the vast majority of Americans.
While the program was unified under Poindexter, it was easy to publicise, easy to criticize, and easy to attack. Now that there are 20 different projects run by N different agencies, how are you going to stop it? Since oversight is so much more difficult, this may even end up being more of an invasion of privacy then the original TIA plan.
more about me
Let's see...
"Criminal Organization". The entire system flat out lied about WMDs. Went to WAR because of it. Murdered Iraqis "for their own good".
"Wack a mole"? Seems it's happening as we speak.
"Terrorists", you define them then. Those that blow up buildings, without provication? Can we say IRAQ? What provication did the US have? What? Name it.
Oh, Sadam is "mean". Sure he was. But so are dozens of others depot regiems around the world. Why him? Why now? Make no mistake, the US commited a henious act of Terrorism there. Just because you "agree" with murder doesn't make it right. Are they "happy" for it? Sure, some are always happy for regime change. If China took over the US, I'm sure many would be "happy", or Cuba, or whomever.
I disagree. I challenge you to name one area of our lives that is entirely outside of government control. I can't think of any.
Or does the fact that the intelligence agencies aren't able to even analyze the massive flow of info they have not bother anyone?
Certainly we don't need a repeat of past events. What's the point of saying, "no don't look, no don't look, no don't look, no don't look", and then when the attack comes, scream, "why weren't you looking???"
That war had a formal declaration of War. This 'war' doesn't.
How do you formally declare war on an organization? They have no ambassadors or government. In the mid 90's bin Laden declared war on the US. We just failed to take it seriously until 9/11. The US hasn't formally declared war since WW2 but that hasn't stopped us from fighting them. The politicians don't have the backbone for it.
BTW: Thanks for the mental stimulation
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
The greatest tradgity is that people have been convinced that a vote for a third party is a wasted vote. Don't fall for it.
Did you notice what happened in the 2000 election? In New Hampshire and Florida, about 3% of the votes went to Ralph Nader. Polls showed that the majority of those votes, had Nader not been there, would have gone to Gore.
If a majority of those who voted for Nader in 2000 in either of those states had voted for Gore instead, he would have had a very clear majority and become our president.
So I suppose that sometimes, yeah, votes for a third-party candidate can make a difference. They can achieve exactly the opposite of what you want. People voted for Nader because he was for the environment, basically. And...um...what has Bush done for the environment lately? (Note, for, not to)
Voting for a third-party candidate is throwing your vote away in the current political-economic climate. Someday, I think there will be third-party candidates who can stand a chance, but not until there's real, serious campaign finance reform.
By this I mean that what I hope to see is no election can be funded, at all, by private money. Everyone gets the same amount, from the government (yes, obviously, it means more taxes. Deal. We pay very low taxes compared to the rest of the Western world).
But, to get a little more back on topic, unless you can raise significantly more than any of the other candidates and get serious name recognition, you don't stand a chance as a third-party candidate these days. So voting for a third-party candidate is throwing your vote away. Vote Democrat, at least they say they want campaign finance reform, and have a much better record of standing up for what they believe in (no, I don't have specific examples. Find your own).
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Bad scary naming (TIA, Total Information Awareness!? come on) and bad marketing aren't going to stop them. They'll rename it to sound beneficials and be much more covert about implementing it. But they still will.
Too much at once (Patriot II) is also scary. So they implement all the little bits of Patriot II over time, until it is eventually all done. Once it's done it'll be much harder to roll it back.
The story of boiling a frog once again comes to mind: stick the frog in boiling water and he jumps out; you lose your dinner. Put the frog in warm water and gradually heat it to boiling -- he stays in and eventually gets cooked.
We are the frogs.
the only thing you *can* do is generalize...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I really don't appreciate this.
Although September 11th was scary, and a wake-up call (to whom, I'll let you decide), you certainly have taken the ball and run with it.
From control of the media, to your obvious relationships with big business, you're feeling pretty good right now, I'll bet. Hell, you barely try and hide controversial projects now; really who's going to stop you? Voter turnout is a joke, and even if people showed up, there's not really a guarrantee that the results haven't been tampered with.
The 'war on terror' is just amazing. So much can be rationalized for 'safety's sake'. Who's un-american this week? Who's a potential threat? Who stands against freedom?
I'm sure you will provide the answers to these questions from your bully pulpit, from newspapers and television that run whatever is put in front of them.
Frankly, terrorists don't scare me. You do.
That's right, my very own government. You've declared war. Not on terror, but on privacy, civil and human rights, and freedom.
Washington? Are you listening? When did rampant wiretapping, invading library records and putting gag orders on librarians, installing keyloggers on our computers, and treating every citizen like a criminal become the definition of freedom?
I'd sure like an answer, Washington, because it sounds like you have it in for me, as well as everyone else who lives here - in the most free nation on earth. For now.
Sincerely,
teamhasnoi
I wish people, especially people responsible for the spending of billions of our tax dollars would get their ideas from sources more credible than CSI or The Six Million Dollar Man...
Talk to the leadership in the Intelligence Technology, and they'll tell you, finding bad guys is hard enough. Trying to sift though mountains of pepper hoping to find the one fly speck, is just insane. One "Intelligence Researcher" refered to the idea of watching every single American for signs of terrorist affiliation is like "Looking for a needle in a haystack of haystacks..." This will ultimately make it much harder to find the real bad guys, waste precious human and financial resources on fantasy tech that does not exist (and won't for some time to come), and in the end... innocent lives continue to hang in the balance.
I have a close friend who during Pappa Bush's administration, worked at Lockheed. He worked on debunking "Brilliant Pebbles" the next incarnation of "Smart Rocks", intelligent projectiles in space designed to hunt down and elliminate the threat of ICBMs to America (all part of the Star Wars Initiative.) He explained that the hardware to make this possible wouldn't exist until some time after 2010, and that even when that hurdle was cleared, there was no way to control the pebbles or have them communicate, that couldn't be jammed by EMP or radiation. In short, it was a doomed idea, and no amount of sexy or comic book fantasizing by Pentagon hawks was going to make this dog hunt. It took years and millions of dollars to finally convince these guys.. this was a bad idea. God only knows what we'll have to do, to get the Dexterites to wise up in a sane timeframe.
This is of course above and beyond the simple gutting of the entire philosophy of our particular form of government. That being;
Government should be transparent, and citizens should have operational privacy.
Somehow, our executive seems to believe the opposite, and it's all too clear that an opaque executive can simple be equated to one who is interested in paving his agenda all over the citizenry and the landscape, rule of law be damned.
Genda
-- Thems that trade a bit of liberty for a bit of security...
You obviously missed my point entirely.
My question was how would you determine with absolute certainty that someone is guilty of a crime, being it under costitutional protection or not, if there is no due process?
Would you except being stuck at Guantanamo for years without an attorney, simply because someone named you as a "illegal combatant"? May I ask you, as you may clarify this, illegal according to whom?
I'll claim with great prejudice, "illegal combatant" is simply a political rethoric, a rethorical rewrite to avoid difficult questions. Obviously works on Americans though.
You obviously take it for granted that these people are, oh whatever, say "illegal combatants" or terrorists, name your favorite. How can you know this with certainty? So far there has been only claims, captures, and complete ignorance of basic human-rights.
Which really is no good method of determining guilt. And is this kind of treatment really worthy of a modern democracy?
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
In the 1980s, Star Wars (SDI, space-based antimissile "defense") was "cancelled", but its budget was wound down to a "mere" $6G:year. As one congressmember said on the floor: "that ain't chump change". Star Wars survived in the bureaucracy and the contractors' labs, even though it was killed in the will of the American people, the Federal government, law, and everywhere else. Of course it reared its ugly head again under Bush Jr, as all Big Daddy's henchmen got their old parking spots back, including John Poindexter kingpin of Iran Contra.
Now Poindexter is back, pardoned for his treasonous crimes under President VP Bush by the judge who cleared the Whitewater investigation's transformation into the Lewinsky investigation, now whitewashing for Bush Jr's Intelligence failure commission. Just like Star Wars came back with the Bush remission, as a "missile defense shield", so essential to fighting a war on suicide bombers. He never left. And this TIA will never leave. Our government has got herpes - just look at all the pockmarks shaped miraculously like their original outbreak during the wild party for rightwingers while Bush Jr was DJ'ing.