October 31, 2006
Total Information Awareness Is Back
Remember Total Information Awareness?
In November 2002, the New York Times reported that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was developing a tracking system called "Total Information Awareness" (TIA), which was intended to detect terrorists through analyzing troves of information. The system, developed under the direction of John Poindexter, then-director of DARPA's Information Awareness Office, was envisioned to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant.
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The public found it so abhorrent, and objected so forcefully, that Congress killed funding for the program in September 2003.
None of us thought that meant the end of TIA, only that it would turn into a classified program and be renamed. Well, the program is now called Tangram, and it is classified:
http://www.rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.schneier.com%2Fblog%2Farchives%2F2006%2F10%2Ftotal_informati.html The government's top intelligence agency is building a computerized system to search very large stores of information for patterns of activity that look like terrorist planning. The system, which is run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the early research phases and is being tested, in part, with government intelligence that may contain information on U.S. citizens and other people inside the country.
It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those that create "suspicion scores" for suspected terrorists by analyzing very large databases of government intelligence, as well as records of individuals' private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.
The information about Tangram comes from a government document looking for contractors to help design and build the system.
read the rest at:
http://www.rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.schneier.com%2Fblog%2Farchives%2F2006%2F10%2Ftotal_informati.html
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