Slashdot Mirror
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.
Isn't this somewhat similar to what the East German secret police did to their citizens during the cold war...
and here I just packed my tinfoil hat, again!
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
Take a look at the bottom of any of the ARDA pages. See the little webmaster mail link? See the domain it goes to? ardaweb@nsa.gov. I think that since the NSA has gotten a hold of it, there's not much you can do about it . . unless you want to disappear.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
"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.
Mass protests have done nothing to stop the war in Iraq...what would it take?
So, the bastards think they can keep track of my porn collection, do they?
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.
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.
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
I just recently applied for a mortgage loan. The loan guy was happy to share my credit report with me. I looked it over, and found a section I couldn't make sense of. I asked the loan guy what that section meant. He said "That's whether or not you're a terrorist. Congrats, you're not." So as far as the credit reporting agencies go, yes, they track that stuff. Scarier still, that little tidbit, accurate or not, is available to every person capable of pulling a credit rating...
;)
I asked the loan guy what he would do if the report said I was a terrorist... He said "I'd excuse myself to the restroom, get in my car, drive at least five miles away, then call my boss!"
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 believe your friendly neighborhood time traveler...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It is in fact not at all like what the East German secret police (Stasi) did during the cold war. There was no legislative shell game to play because the legislature was a sham. The scope of individual liberty was so small that there was no comparable initiative from Stasi. There was no need to sift through large amounts of data about citizens to find out what they needed to know. Activities were all duly registered, and all records were available to them. Elaborate systems of informants kept tabs on any person of interest.
It's hard to believe that anyone old enough to remember the cold war would say something so ridiculous. American domestic intelligence activities take place in a society where individuals enjoy broad latitude of action outside of state control. Without that context, total information awareness or whatever it has become would not even be a dream in a spies mind.
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
'Ya know, that's wonderful, but let's be rational about this. 3,000 deaths... a staggering number, right? However, it is hardly the most tragic thing ever to happen: "In 2002, an estimated 17,419 people died in alcohol-related traffic crashes--an average of one every 30 minutes. These deaths constitute 41 percent of the 42,815 total traffic fatalities. (NHTSA, 2003)" [from MADD.] Don't get me wrong... 9/11 was no doubt a significant event. I just mean to say that the threat posed by it pales in comparison to so many of the threats that surround us every day and which go largely unnoticed.
Even if we assume that 9/11 represented such a grave threat as to cause us to consider the radical restructuring of the very nature of our rights, then we must ask if that is a productive course of action. Remember when TIME magazine ran the cover article claiming that not enough was done to prevent 9/11, even with the Phoenix memo and other warnings? So, please, remind me again how TIA will prevent a "second 9/11?"
While you may be ready to give up your rights in response to a vauge threat (color scale of doom, anyone?) and to passively take hook, line and sinker, there remain those of us who still value the lives lost back in the late 1700s... the lives which won us this freedom in the first place.
#define DRM chmod 000
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.
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!
"In the language of the Elder Days, 'Arda' signified the World and all that is in it." -- from The Encyclopedia of Arda
I guess it's a suitably ambitious acronym for the project.
This could be a tool to find the next 9/11 and I am all for it.
If there were going to be another terrorist attack, don't you think *something* would already have happened, even if it was just a Hammas-style bus bombing?
When even the normally insane Pat Buchanan writes a lengthy, thoughtful, and accurate essay on why the "war on terror" is a sham - and it gets the cover of a conservative magazine, that should set off alarm bells in everyones' heads.
Al Qaeda already got what they wanted - they blew up some Americans, sent the US on its way to becoming a totalitarian state, isolated it from its allies (particularly in the Middle East), *and* as a bonus Iraq will soon be converted into a hardline Islamic nation. They didn't even lose their leader in the process.
What could they possibly gain by sticking their necks out again?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I thought government researchers were killed when their programs got cancelled.
Turns out, they just go get similar jobs in a similar field. Wow.
I lived in West Berlin for over a year oh so long ago. I used to make kindof a study of the wall. Even brought back a piece of it, long before it came down and was sold in pieces in the US like pet rocks. (taking the piece home made kindof a funny story. I was taken off the subway by plainclothes policemen who thought I was going to use it to vandalize something. I switched to English and told them I was an American tourist who was bringing home a souvenir, so they let me go, rock and all)
From what I remember, there was "the wall" - that part that is famous in pictures, with the graffiti and all. Incidently, it was covered/topped with what looked like a continuous cylinder maybe 2 or 3 feet in diameter along the top. I imagine that would have been very hard to get past without special equipment. Behind the wall was the no man's land with a small access road for patrols and the antitank ditch in it. Behind that was a somewhat shorter inner wall as well.
Of course, "the wall" was different in different places. In some places it was partly made up of buildings. Additionally, the western subway went under parts of East Berlin. You could sometimes see guards in the stations in the Eastern part.
It was an interesting study in security. As the wall changed in form due to the changing geography, infrastructure, and so forth, you could see how one who wanted out would attempt to choose the weakest link. One guy built a flat car and drove under the checkpoint gates. Another tightrope walked over the wall (IIRC). And so forth.
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 government isn't really spying on you, per se.
Of course not.
They are taking all the public information out there, and data mining it to potentially flag and catch criminals and terrorists.
And it won't flag and catch me by mistake. They'd never make an error like that. This technology only affects bad guys.
This actually should be wonderful news for me. I made $92 off of Poindexter's stupid Total Information Awareness program last year by selling this T-shirt protesting it: "I gave up my essential liberties to obtain a little temporary security, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!" [Disclaimer: I might make money off you if you click that link and buy one, but I have a job, honestly don't need your money, would forward it to no worthy cause, and am just showing off my shirt design and bragging about the fact that I made $92 off of Total Information Awareness.]
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.
Well, let's not get too presumptive about 9/11. It hasn't been demonstrated at all that the only way to prevent this attack would have been to implement a massively connected database with an extensive electronic dossier on each one of us. In fact, it hasn't been demonstrated at all that the attack could not have been prevented simply by people doing their jobs like they were supposed to.
Once the 9/11 commission finishes its report, maybe we will see what improvements can be made short of creating an unAmerican police state.
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.
I used to work for TIA, as part of a software contractor. If I named the contractor, it would mean little to you, but we were an integral and successful part of Poindexter's plans - I was supposed to meet the man myself and ended up meeting all his direct reports (he was busy at the last minute). We were part of a larger software effort invovling information databases. I made quite a good living.
I ended up in the job, as is always the way, by drifting from one task to another inside the contractor until I ended up doing anti-terrorist work - a classic "slippery slope".
I did the only honest thing I felt I could - I quit. Of course, I'm not going to claim I was any sort of hero. Because I didn't like why I was working, I didn't like my job, and as a software programmer, it wasn't too hard to find another job. But, I did quit a good job for essentially political reasons.
I mention this for 2 reasons: 1) If people refused to do the work, refused to take the jobs, the program would never succeed (I know it's easy to say - I have no kids to feed - but still, it's true). Hell, people fled the country to avoid fighting in Vietnam. 2) It was common knowledge that there was little risk in having TIA go away - everything would stay the same (and has, at my old company). 3) What we were doing was not secret - never was. But nobody knew anyway, and the people running the show liked it that way. Security through obscurity.
I guess nobody noticed that over the XMAS holidays a plan to attack the US via plane hijackings was thwarted.
Given that the details are super secret, so it could have been just a confidence improving spoof. I don't remember any evidence being produced to the public that there was a threat on any of the planes that were grounded.
I don't see how TIA or PATRIOT are needed. The events of 9/11 happened because of broad agency incompetence at handling the power they already had at the time, not because of a supposed lack of power. I fear giving more power to the incompetent.
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...
Sorry for this offtopic rant, but statements like these really piss me off:
Jeez. Do you know how ignorant that paragraph makes you seem? You need the basic rights like due process and a fair trial to actually establish for a fact that these people are "combatant terrorists".
They may be, but there is no fscking way of knowing, unless they are given the rights, which has been explicitly been taken away from them. How complicated is that to understand?!?
Ofcourse, G. W. Bush haven't understood this at all, but this should be no surprise. I quote: "the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people". How does he know?
But let's be consistent in our reasoning at least. Since murder is also a sever crime, I suggest we remove all security that the law provides for fair trials, if the poeple are accused for murder. After all they are murderers and don't deserve any legal protection, now do they?
Last I checked, some of these "combatant terrorists" held which were release after only 18 months, was found to be a taxi-driver and his ride. I think you should consider the possibility that the people giving out "terrorists", has aproximately the same credability as those informing the US about Iraqi WMD.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.