If At First You Don’t Succeed, Spy, Spy Again
My New Total Information Awareness Technique Will Be Totally Unstoppable
By Justin Rood –
October 20, 2006, 3:04 PMThe U.S. government is rebuilding the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, and it’s going to be better than ever!
Shane Harris at National Journal tells us today that despite efforts to kill TIA, it has lived on in a quiet corner of the NSA. Now, it’s taking form as “Tangram,” a program in which former TIA contractors build on existing TIA research to create a new, enhanced form of the program.
Like TIA, Tangram would compile vast databases of information on hundreds of millions of innocent people, including communications records, credit card transactions and travel information, and mine them for patterns of behavior which look suspiciously terroristical.
But check this out! The problem with the old method of data mining, according to Tangram’s caretakers, is that they used a “guilt-by-association” model — that is, it found terror suspects by seeing who was linked to known or suspected terrorists. Tangram tosses that outmoded concept. It can find terrorists even among innocent people with no ties to suspected terrorists!
We can finally catch people who spontaneously decide to hate the United States! Sweet!
Hey, only one problem, though: according to Tangram’s keepers, terrorism researchers “cannot readily distinguish the absolute scale of normal behaviors” for innocent people or for terrorists. In other words, no one yet knows how terrorist activity differs from non-terrorist activity.
Cheezit, catching terrorists by monitoring their everyday transactions is going to totally rock — as soon as we can figure out how a terrorist buys a toaster differently than an innocent person. (They pay cash, and don’t buy any bread to go with it?)
Total Infornation Awareness, if you remember, was a spying program by which the US government thought to be able to mine data from any aspect of any person’s individual records – school, medical, credit cards, bank, phone, everything – which would supposedly make an holistic picture of that person’s life and habits and therefore make it possible to spot potential terrorist activity.
In September 2003, Congress ended funding for Terrorism Information Awareness. But TIA didn’t actually go away – surveillance activities were just shunted to the NSA under different names, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Confirmation of this comes from Govexec.com:
In February, National Journal revealed that names of component TIA programs were simply changed and transferred to a research-and-development unit principally overseen by the National Security Agency. The unit, now under the control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, also runs Tangram.
The Tangram document cites several TIA programs — by their new names — as forming the latest phase of research upon which Tangram will build. In a prepared statement, the intelligence director’s office said, “Tangram is addressing the problem that the intelligence community receives vast amounts of data a day and there are a wide variety of algorithms — mathematical procedures — for figuring out what is relevant. Different algorithms serve different purposes, but we believe that combining them will provide us new insights in detecting terrorist plans and activities. The project will allow analysts to mix and match various methods to connect the dots.”
TIA was similarly envisioned as a vast combination of detection methods. In Tangram, “I see the system of systems that is essentially TIA about to be born,” said Tim Sparapani, the legislative counsel on privacy issues for the American Civil Liberties Union. “TIA was designed to be one unified system,” he said. “This is the vision, I think, made practical.”
Read more: War on Terror, US, Spying, Surveillance, Wiretapping, Total Information Awareness, NSA, Tangram.
