Today's Salon.com Cover Story...

[Jon Gabriel]

...is an interesting examination of the US gov't's Total Information Awareness program. Several database and computer technology experts weigh in on its feasability and the statistical possibility of false accusations.

The article is in Salon's premium section, and it is also over 20K and 10 pages, so I won't post it here. If anyone wants a copy sent, let me know offlist.

Jon

Excerpt below:
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Is Big Brother our only hope against bin Laden?
Civil libertarians are outraged about Total Information Awareness, the government's Orwellian plan to monitor everyone, all the time. But some computer scientists say it might be the only way to save civilization.
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By Farhad Manjoo
Dec. 3, 2002 | On Aug. 28, 2001, a 33-year-old Egyptian flight-school student named Mohamed Atta walked into a Kinko's copy shop in Hollywood, Fla., and sat down at a computer with Internet access. He logged on to American Airlines' Web site, punched in a frequent-flyer account number he'd signed up for three days before, and ordered two first-class, one-way e-tickets for a Sept. 11 flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Atta paid for the tickets -- one of which was for Abdulaziz Alomari, a Saudi flight student also living in Florida -- with a Visa card he had recently been issued.

The next day, Hamza Alghamdi, a Saudi man who was also training to become a pilot, went to the same Kinko's. There, he used a Visa debit card to purchase a one-way seat on United Airlines Flight 175, another Sept. 11 flight from Boston to Los Angeles. The day after that, Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza's brother, used the same debit card to purchase a business-class seat on Flight 175; he might have done it from the Hollywood Kinko's, too. And at around the same time, all across the country, 15 other Arab men, several of them flight students, were also buying seats on California-bound flights leaving on the morning of Sept. 11. Six of the men gave the airlines Atta's home phone number as a principal point of contact. Some of them paid for the seats with the same credit card. A few used identical frequent-flyer numbers.

It's now obvious that there was a method to what the men did that August; had someone been on their trail, their actions would have seemed too synchronized, and the web of connections between them too intricate, to have been dismissed as mere coincidence. Something was up. And if the authorities had enjoyed access, at the time, to the men's lives -- to their credit card logs, their bank records, details of their e-mail and cellphone usage, their travel itineraries, and to every other electronic footprint that people leave in modern society -- the government might have seen in the disparate efforts of 19 men the makings of the plot they were to execute on Sept. 11, 2001. Right?

We could have predicted it. That's the underlying assumption of Total Information Awareness, a new Defense Department program that aims to collect and analyze mountains of personal data -- on foreigners as well as Americans -- in the hope of spotting the sort of "suspicious" behavior that preceded the attacks on New York and Washington. The effort, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is at this point only a vaguely defined research project; officials at the agency have so far declined to fully brief the public on the program and its potential cost, and the few documents made available have stressed that technologists will need several years to achieve many of TIA's goals.

Civil libertarians, not unexpectedly, are already raising a ruckus, their temper brought to a flaring point by the appointment of the man tapped to head the agency: John Poindexter, Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, who was convicted (though, on appeal, acquitted) of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal. The invasion of privacy threatened by the name "Total Information Awareness" itself is also sure to raise constitutional questions. But computer scientists who specialize in the kinds of technologies necessary to make something like TIA work are intrigued -- even as they express concern. For some, the threat posed by terrorism is so great that the need for a comprehensive response can be equated to the need for the Manhattan Project. It's a comparison meant to convey both how dangerous and how vital to our society constant data collection may be.

"Frankly, I don't see any other way for us to survive as a civilization," says Jeffrey Ullman, a computer scientist at Stanford University and an expert on database theory. "We're heading for a world where any creep with a grudge can build himself a dirty bomb. Al-Qaida has just broken new ground, but you can't see these things as a unique phenomenon. We have to have in place a system that makes it very hard for individuals anywhere to do such things."




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