The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is building a new terrorist profiling system, called Tangram. What’s wrong with the old profiling systems, you might ask? Well, according to an unclassified document describing Tangram, they’re not all that good at catching terrorists.
The document, which is a description of the Tangram program for potential contractors, describes other, existing profiling and detection systems that haven’t moved beyond so-called “guilt-by-association models,” which link suspected terrorists to potential associates, but apparently don’t tell analysts much about why those links are significant. Tangram wants to improve upon these methods, as well as investigate the effectiveness of other detection links such as “collective inferencing,” which attempt to create suspicion scores of entire networks of people simultaneously.
Tangram’s pedigree also is familiar. It is apparently the next generation of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness system, which has been conducted in secret since Congress pulled public funding on the project in 2003. TIA programs form the foundation for Tangram, the document describing the system shows. (With one big difference: no privacy protections.)
Read the full story on Tangram in National Journal here.
– Shane Harris
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Good Morning Folks,
An interesting idea but under current U.S. law it wouldn’t be very effective, I’m afraid.
A better system of Airport Security would be to issue every passenger and their luggage an RFID, it would simply be printed on both the boarding pass and luggage check. Doing this would be simple enough at the check in counter. The printing of RFID’s is no longer a big deal.
This tagging would allow the TSA to track every passenger and their bags while on the secure side of every airport that they would be in for their entire trip. If a passenger gets off their flight at the wrong airport red flags would go up the instant they left the secured area.
If the goal is to increase security while at the same time controling costs this may very well be the method of garding our airports. Any privacy issues are basicly a wash with other security measures already in place.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
“under current US law” doesn’t really matter anymore — as of the last week or so, if you wish to press the issue of something’s legality or Constitutionality, the President can declare you an enemy combatant because you’re interfering with the War on Terror, and stash you someplace for a *long* time.
Notice the Third eye and the Pyramid in the IAO logo ? Yep it’s ” Them ” all part of the ” secret ” but yet not so secret behind the visable system we live under.