Public
misconceptions of privacy and civil liberties issues surrounding the
Defense Department's Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program
led to its demise, a Defense official said on Tuesday.
The end of TIA, which called for "mining" commercial databases
for information on potential terrorists, was the result of "lots of
distortions and misunderstandings," Robert Popp, a special assistant
to the director for strategic matters at the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, said at an event sponsored by the Potomac
Institute.
Popp said TIA researchers were pursuing the project under two
agendas: operational, and research and development. The operational
aspect called for DARPA to provide R&D groups with different
technologies in order to "tie many different agencies together,"
Popp said. And on the research front, DARPA asked whether "there may
be other data in the information space that may be useful for the
government to exploit in its counter terrorism."
"Terrorist acts must involve people ... and plans and activities
... that will leave an information signature," he said. DARPA was
"extremely public" in detailing its TIA work, Popp added, but that
allowed the project to be "distorted in the public."
Asked how he might have handled the situation differently, he
said, "When the first onslaught of distortions occurred, we would've
been much more public ... to clear the record ... in respect to the
public and to Congress."
In place of TIA, perhaps there is a "need for a specific
intelligence agency to go after terrorists" with a limited charter,
said Kim Taipale, executive director for the Center for Advanced
Studies in Science and Technology Policy.
"We have a long way to go on this," said Dan Gallington, a senior
research fellow at the Potomac Institute. He called for specific
congressional oversight committees to handle the situation.
"The goal is security with privacy," Taipale added. "[That] does
not mean balancing security and privacy but maximizing the set of
results you want within those constraints."
"It's best solved by using guiding principles, not ... rigged
structure or rules that pre-determine where you're trying to get
to," he said. "Security and privacy are not dichotomous rivals to be
traded one for another in a zero-sum game; they are dual objectives,
each to be maximized within certain constraints."
Taipale said, "Technology is not the solution" but only a "tool
to allocate resources."
"In a society that is increasingly digitized, technology creates
privacy problems," Taipale said. The problem, therefore, he said, is
not controversial programs like data mining, but how to respond to
the digitized society.
"We really face two inevitable futures," Taipale said. "Develop
technologies that are built to provide privacy-protecting mechanisms
[or] rely solely on legal mechanisms ... to control the use of
technologies."
Taipale said specific tech implementations should be subject to
congressional oversight, administrative procedures and judicial
review. "It's the classic needle-in-the-haystack problem, [but] even
worse, the needles themselves appear innocuous in isolation," he
said.
