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-Caveat Lector- "TIA" Reboots
We all knew that Total Information Awareness and its uber-database progeny weren't going away. It was just a question of what names TIA's bastard children were now using, and what government agencies had decided to give 'em a home.
Today, we find out about two of the not-so-little stinkers. Newsweek, in a brutal assessment of the NSA and other intelligence agencies ("Wanted: Competent Big Brothers"), tucks in this nugget:
Today, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename of TOPSAIL, two officials privy to the intelligence tell NEWSWEEK. It is in programs like these that real data mining is going on and —considering the furor over TIA— with fewer intrusions on civil liberties than occur under the NSA surveillance program.
"It’s the best thing to come out of American intelligence in decades," says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "It is truly Poindexter’s brainchild. Of all the people in the intelligence business, he has the keenest appreciation of using advanced information technology for intelligence gathering."
Poindexter, who lives just outside Washington in Rockville, Md., could not be reached for comment on whether he is still involved with TOPSAIL.
Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor has discovered a new data-mining program over at the Homeland Security Department. It's called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement -- "ADVISE," for short.
What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.
But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA [Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment] portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.
For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.
Another component of ADVISE that the Monitor doesn't pick up on: The project seems closely tied towards WMD defense.
It'll "incorporate a comprehensive encyclopedia of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive threat and effects data," DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology Charles McQueary told the House Committee on Science last year.
This report sketches out one way ADVISE might use that information:
A radiation detector at a Canadian border crossing may pick up an anomalous reading that might be too ambiguous to trigger an alarm, but the incorporation of additional data (e.g., the driver is associated with a group known to be collecting nuclear materials or the same anomalous reading appears every week from the same driver and truck) would greatly improve the threat detection ability of these systems.
UPDATE 9:42 AM:
"After seven weeks of refusing to provide Congress with details of its secret domestic spying program," the L.A. Times reports, "the White House changed course Wednesday and began to describe the operations of the controversial surveillance to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees."
-------------------------
Wanted: Competent Big Brothers
Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11238800/site/newsweek/
One indication of how superficial intelligence reform has been is that when the nation’s top spy, John Negroponte, was asked whether he was aware of TIA’s successor at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in late January, he seemed completely stumped.
"I don’t know the answer," replied Negroponte, who is supposed to be coordinating intel transformation as the new national director of intelligence.
FBI Director Robert Mueller also said he had "no knowledge" of the program.
(Negroponte’s deputy, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA director who’s been involved in intel far longer, seemed to indirectly confirm Topsail’s existence when he said he would respond "in closed session.")
<snip>
To little notice, a giant $1 billion-plus program called Trailblazer that was to have brought the NSA up to date in data mining and pattern analysis —transforming the NSA's blizzard of signals intelligence into an easily searchable database— turned into such a boondoggle that, one intelligence official says, "nothing can be salvaged out of it."
"It’s a complete and abject failure," says Robert D. Steele, a CIA veteran who is familiar with the program.
By most accounts, no one at senior levels has a good idea of how to replace the failed Trailblazer. Now, time’s awasting.
Former NSA senior director Philip Bobbitt, writing recently in The New York Times, provided a vivid example of the importance of data mining and pattern analysis.
On Sept. 10, 2001, he wrote, the NSA intercepted two messages: ''The match begins tomorrow'' and ''Tomorrow is zero hour.'' They were picked up from random monitoring of pay phones in areas of Afghanistan where Al Qaeda was active. No one knew what to make of them, and in any case they were not translated or disseminated until Sept. 12.
But "had we at the time cross-referenced credit card accounts, frequent-flyer programs and a cellphone number shared by those two men, data mining might easily have picked up on the 17 other men linked to them and flying on the same day at the same time on four flights," Bobbitt wrote.
Today the NSA seems hardly more capable of piecing together the next "tomorrow is zero hour" intercept.
Is anything going right with intelligence reform?
Of course: you can’t throw a half a trillion dollars at a problem —as the administration is doing with its latest defense and security budget— without some of it sticking successfully.
Vice President Dick Cheney asserted recently that the NSA’s domestic surveillance program has "saved thousands of lives."
The only domestic success that administration has publicly linked to the surveillance program is the exposure of a rather comical plan by truck driver Iyman Faris to blowtorch the Brooklyn Bridge (even that claim is questionable). A U.S. official privy to the intelligence tells NEWSWEEK that another attack on a U.S. urban area was averted as well. The administration won’t discuss this averted plot, however, because to do so would reveal secret NSA listening methods.
Ironically, one of the most hopeful new intelligence surveillance programs is one that is still demonized in the media and on Capitol Hill. This is the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, which was canceled after the last big civil-liberties scandal in late 2002. TIA was the creation of Adm. John Poindexter, the Iran-contra figure who was brought in to run the new program but was cashiered after it was uncovered by The New York Times. TIA was an effort to vacuum up as much U.S. transactions information as possible, such as the purchase of plane tickets or, say, large amounts of fertilizer as a way of anticipating terror plots. But the program was dropped after several senators blasted some of Poindexter’s odder suggestions, like creating a "futures market" in which terror experts could bet on likely terror events and thereby add to the government’s knowledge base.
Yet today, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename of Topsail (minus the futures market), two officials privy to the intelligence tell NEWSWEEK. It is in programs like these that real data mining is going on and —considering the furor over TIA— with fewer intrusions on civil liberties than occur under the NSA surveillance program.
"It’s the best thing to come out of American intelligence in decades," says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "It is truly Poindexter’s brainchild. Of all the people in the intelligence business, he has the keenest appreciation of using advanced information technology for intelligence gathering."
Poindexter, who lives just outside Washington in Rockville, Md., could not be reached for comment on whether he is still involved with Topsail.
<snip>
[I]f you’re a "war president," as Bush describes himself, and you want to reassert presidential power, as he does, then permanent war can be a good thing ...
Perhaps it is why the president —who once dismissed Osama bin Laden as unimportant as he diverted the nation’s attention and resources to Iraq— now says that Americans should take the mastermind of 9/11 "seriously" ...
Perhaps it is why the Bush administration is now devoting so much to its military buildup while stripping critical education programs needed to make America more competitive, insisting on permanent tax cuts and ensuring monster deficits for decades.
Wait a minute. Drawing the lone superpower into an endless global struggle, draining it of its wealth and will … that was Osama bin Laden’s strategic goal, right?
Didn’t we have some intelligence on that once?
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