[CLUE-Talk] More On Less Privacy

[Randy Arabie]

This appeared in the NY Times.

The Pentagon is working on an intelligence gathering and analysis 
project that will combine commercial and government databases.

Some of the necessary legislative changes to authorize this sort of 
project are already proposed in the Homeland Security Act now before 
Congress.

I suppose this will move forward, with Republicans soon to be in charge 
of both the Senate and the House.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/politics/09COMP.html?ex=1037509200&en=873ff5626a3c666e&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
---------------------------------------------------------------------

November 9, 2002
Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of
Americans
By JOHN MARKOFF


The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a
vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part
of the hunt for terrorists around the globe ? including the United
States.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has
described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will
provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with
instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records
to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without
a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been
permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal
authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security
adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government
needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute
details of electronic life in the United States.

Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents
and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the
government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate
commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence
agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful
computers.

"We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we
find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old,
generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to
knowledge, and create actionable options," he said in a speech in
California earlier this year.

Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to
take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is
responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake
of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information
Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been
proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that
is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act
of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could
do with private information.

The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let
intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries
civil liberties proponents.

"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America,"
said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information
Center in Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the
technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a
system of national surveillance of the American public."

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been briefed on the
project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a lunch to discuss it,
according to a Pentagon spokesman.

"As part of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a
variety of organizations, to include the law enforcement community,"
a Pentagon spokeswoman said.

An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be
identified, said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the
Pentagon about the project but that no final decision had been made
about what information the F.B.I. might add to the system.

A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, Gordon
Johndroe, said officials in the office were not familiar with the
computer project and he declined to discuss concerns raised by the
project's critics without knowing more about it.

He referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials
said they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too
were not familiar enough with the project.

Some members of a panel of computer scientists and policy experts who
were asked by the Pentagon to review the privacy implications this
summer said terrorists might find ways to avoid detection and that
the system might be easily abused.

"A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about
the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this
administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer
scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing
Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."

Other technology policy experts dispute that assessment and support
Admiral Poindexter's position that linking of databases is necessary
to track potential enemies operating inside the United States.

"They're conceptualizing the problem in the way we've suggested it
needs to be understood," said Philip Zelikow, a historian who is
executive director of the Markle Foundation task force on National
Security in the Information Age. "They have a pretty good vision of
the need to make the tradeoffs in favor of more sharing and
openness."

On Wednesday morning, the panel reported its findings to Dr. Tony
Tether, the director of the defense research agency, urging
development of technologies to protect privacy as well as
surveillance, according to several people who attended the meeting.

If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would
rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential
terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.

The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern
recognition techniques known as "data mining," a set of statistical
techniques used by scientists as well as by marketers searching for
potential customers.

The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and
view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and
groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information
efficiently, all from their individual computers.

The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test
data that would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security
Command at Fort Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system
would be put into operation.

The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the
government to lash together both commercial and government data to
hunt for patterns of terrorist activities.

"What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system
to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify
and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and
thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-
empt and defeat terrorist acts," said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for
the defense research agency.

Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who
was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had
worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls.
Admiral Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal
appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony
before Congress about the case.



Copyright The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy

-- 
Allons Rouler!
        
Randy
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://cluedenver.org/pipermail/clue-talk/attachments/20021111/0a879c79/attachment.bin