Homeland Security revives supersnoop - March 8, 2007
mevle...@yahoo.ca
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published March 8, 2007
Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system
that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect
possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have
called for investigations.
The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by
the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was
banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the
project called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization,
Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R.
Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations
Committee.
The investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy
laws, and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq
war supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a
panel aide said.
The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to
track individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop
computer algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral
scientists say can predict terrorist behavior.
Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet
details, medical records, travel and banking information.
Privacy concerns prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to
introduce legislation in January to require that government agencies
disclose data-mining practices in regular reports to Congress.
"A serious discussion on the implications of data-mining programs
is long overdue," Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and a sponsor
of the bill, said yesterday. Sen. John E. Sununu, New Hampshire
Republican, is also a bill sponsor.
"Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of
secret government programs analyzing their personal information.
Congress needs to know more about the operational aspects and privacy
implications of data-mining programs before these programs are allowed
to go forward," Mr. Feingold said.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not return
a call for comment.
Congress also tucked language inside Homeland Security's spending
bill in September requiring an investigation by the agency's inspector
general, but allowed $40 million in funding to go forward in this
year's budget.
"The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and
correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable
intelligence on terrorists," the spending bill said. "A prototype is
currently available to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using
departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens."
According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in
March 2003, TIA planned "to use data mining technologies to sift
through personal transactions in electronic data to find patterns and
associations connected to terrorist threats and activities."
"Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project
provoked expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion
of privacy of law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the
direction of the project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the
Iran-Contra affair," the CRS report said.
"While the law enforcement and intelligence communities argue that
more sophisticated information gathering techniques are essential to
combat today's sophisticated terrorists, civil libertarians worry that
the government's increased capability to assemble information will
result in increased and unchecked government power, and the erosion of
individual privacy," the report said.
ADVISE was initiated in 2003 following the demise of the TIA
project.
The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive
quantities of information from many different sources" to find "hidden
relationships in the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia
National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a
Homeland Security workshop that outlined this and other technology
under development.
The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million
"relationships" or connections per hour, says the report, which
included an example of how friends, family members, locations and
workplaces can be linked by pinging the data.
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