“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 and­con­sid­er­ing the furor over TIAwith fewer intru­sions on civil lib­er­ties than occur under the NSA sur­veil­lance pro­gram. “Its 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 Poindexters 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.

(Big ups: Eric, Laura)
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.” And the WaPo notes that “twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the pre­sid­ing judge of a secret sur­veil­lance court that infor­ma­tion over­heard in President Bush’s eaves­drop­ping pro­gram may have been improp­erly used to obtain wire­tap war­rants in the court.“
UPDATE 2:04 PM: “I won­der if this is not yet another exam­ple of our coun­trys over-​​reliance on tech­nol­ogy to try to solve its intel­li­gence prob­lems,” says Kris, who knows a thing or two about intel.

[Osama] prob­a­bly isnt click­ing around on Amazon. The bad guys are smart enough to adapt to the envi­ron­ment in which they live. They know when our satel­lites are pass­ing over. They know that we mon­i­tor their com­mu­ni­ca­tions and work to counter that. Theyll counter this too. Im not say­ing that some­thing like this wont pro­duce use­ful intel­li­gence. Im sure it will, but well still be left with gaps.

February 9th, 2006 | You can run... | 184548 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/02/09/tia-reboots/%22TIA%22+Reboots2006-02-09+14%3A23%3A45murdoc You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.