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Home > News & Views > What Matters: June 2009 > What Matters Archive >What Matters: January 2003

WHAT MATTERS: JANUARY 2003

Big Brother Is No Longer Fiction: On theInternet, Everyone Knows You're a Poindexter

Total Information Awareness (TIA)-a new government R&D program-

evokes the specter of a total surveil lance state while it purports to

defend America against the threat of terrorism. Before I present

"information awareness" about how the government is harnessing

technology for TIA, let's review the context of recent efforts to fight

terrorism and increase the security of U.S. citizens.

Energized by the horrific events of September 11th, the federal

government has-rapidly, and with very l ittle debate-enacted draconian

measures to enforce a "security" state. Ostensibly designed to crack

down on terrorists, these new measures are in fact terrorizing many

U.S. residents, rolling back decades of hard-won civil rights protections,

and threatening the very basis of our democratic system, the

Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

These measures include: The USA PATRIOT Act (the acronym stands for

Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools

Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) and the Homeland

Security Act, arrests and detentions without charges, secret military

tribunals, null ification of judicial safeguards, and unwarranted domestic

spying on private citizens and their communications, purchases, even

library habits. Technologies under development by the TIA program will

create an information security apparatus worthy of George Orwell's1984or the cynical-paranoid worldview of Robert Anton Wilson and

Robert Shea's The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

If the technologies themselves aren't creepy enough, you might

shudder when you see the early logo (above) of the Information

Awareness Office (IAO). Recently removed from their website, the

chilling graphic featured a Masonic pyramid-recognizable from the back

of the U. S. Dollar bill-except in this version the pyramid's all-seeing

eye scans the globe with a surreal light beam worthy of science fiction.

Perhaps even more disturbing, the office is headed by former Admiral

John Poindexter. You might remember him from Iran-Contra, the

Reagan administration's secret scheme to support Nicaraguan terrorists

with proceeds from illegal arms sales to Iran. As William Safire

reminded us in The New York Times:

"A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of

misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court

overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for

his testimony."

Matters: January 2003 | MIT Alumni Association's Infinite Connection https://alum.mit.edu/news/WhatMatters/Archiv

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I work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation ( EFF) where we review

and respond to legislation and policymaking that affects our digital

rights. We struggle to keep up with a deluge of new proposals and

legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act (USAPA). The Act was

approved within five weeks with practically no floor debate by a nearly

unanimous Congress. Signed into law on October 26, 2001, USAPA

gave sweeping new powers to both domestic law enforcement and

international intelligence agencies and eliminated the checks and

balances previously afforded courts to curb abuses. USAPA gave us

expanded surveillance with reduced judicial oversight, overreaching

police powers with a lack of focus on terrorism, including a mechanism

permitting U.S. foreign intelligence agents to spy on U.S. citizens.

In June 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft revamped FBI

regulations to permit domestic surveillance-including online

surveillance-of political, social, or ethnic groups without a subpoena or

a court order, even in cases where there is no reasonable suspicion of

criminal activity. Ashcroft unleashed the FBI from earlier procedural

reforms which were instituted in the '70s following revelation of

widespread abuses like the COINTELPRO program. (COINTELPRO was a

program under which FBI agents attended political protests, kept

dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. citizens, including the Rev. Martin

Luther King, Jr. A throwback to the excesses of McCarthyism,

CONTELPRO actively disrupted the lives and careers of those who J.

Edgar Hoover and his allies considered disloyal to America.)

The Homeland Security Act (HSA), signed into law on November 25,

2002, authorized the creation of a massive new Department of

Homeland Security to coordinate the efforts of twenty-two government

agencies.

USAPA established an exception to privacy laws permitting Internet

Service Providers (ISPs) to disclose email or other electronic

communications to specific law-enforcement agencies without a

subpoena or a court order. Under USAPA, an ISP had to have a

reasonable belief that an emergency exists where there is immediate

danger of death or serious physical injury. The Homeland Security Act

downgrades "reasonable belief" to a "good faith" requirement and

replaces the death-or-serious-injury requirement with an ill-defined

"immediate threat to a national-security interest." The HSA leaves it to

commercial businesses (ISPs)-not supposedly accountable public

personnel-to decide for themselves what constitutes a national-security

interest. It also broadens the disclosure exception to all government

agencies, including school principals and potentially even dog catchers,

rather than those involved specifically in law enforcement.

Just after September 11, 2001, thousands of people of Middle Eastern

heritage-and many who simply "looked" to be Middle Eastern, Arab or

Moslem-were held in indefinite detention without attorneys or even

charges brought against them. Some were transported to the

Guatanamo U.S. Naval base on Cuba, questioned, investigated,

subjected to questionable conditions contrary to the Geneva

Convention, and perhaps tried in secret military tribunals. Again in

December 2002 and January 2003, the INS rounded up hundreds of


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men and boys of Middle Eastern descent after requiring all citizens of

certain Arab countries in the U.S. to register with the INS. These mass

arrests have not yet approached the magnitude of the internment of

Japanese, Japanese-Americans, and many who simply looked Japanese,

in U.S. camps during World War II, but these are worrisome signs

nonetheless.

The political and legal climate is extremely tense and the forces of

technology are brought to bear in attempts to find quick fixes to ease

that tension.

Air travelers find themselves on secret "no fly" and "maybe fly" lists

under the newly established Transportation Security Administration

(TSA) now the employer of airport security checkpoint personnel. The

new Computerized Assisted Passenger Screening (CAPPS II) passenger

profiling system is designed to identify and track travelers.

But the most interesting-and far-reaching-technologies come from the

Total Information Awareness research program sponsored by the

Information Awareness Office (IAO) at the Defense Advanced Research

Projects Agency (DARPA), the military agency which sponsored early

development of the Internet. DARPA has accepted the TIA project

proposed by Admiral Poindexter. With TIA, he'll seek to use information

technology for unprecedented surveillance on a massive scale.

In particular, TIA plans to use transactional data such as financial,

education, travel, medical, veterinary, transportation, and housing

information, along with biometric data, such as face, fingerprint, gait,

and iris recognition to "determine the feasibility of searching vast

quantities of data to determine links and patterns indicative of terrorist

activities," explained Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge.

TIA projects include technologies beyond even the wildest dreams of

Orwell's Big Brother:

Genisys -ultra-large, all-source terrorist information repositories

Genoa II -developing information technology needed by teams ofintelligence analysts in anticipating terrorist threats

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery -linking sparse

evidence in large amounts of classified and unclassified datasources

Wargaming the Assymetric Environment -predictivetechnology in the context of terrorists' political, cultural, andideological environment

Wargaming the Assymetric Environment -predictivetechnology in the context of terrorists' political, cultural, and

ideological environment

FutureMap -market-based techniques for avoiding surprise andpredicting future events

Bio-Surveillance -early detection of clandestine bio-warfareattack

Human ID at a Distance -identify humans at border crossing,DoD facilities, etc., from face, gait, and iris recognition

Effective, Affordable, Resusable Speech -to Text(EARS)-automatic transcription technology for audio signals

Translingual Information Detection, Extraction andSummarization -multilingual language processing

Babylon -rapid, two-way, natural language speech translation


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interfaces for combat environments

Communicator -enabling warfighters to talk with computers

On the face of it some of these technologies might sound fairly

non-threatening to the average American, but in the context of current

attacks of civil liberties, TIA technologies have frightening implications

and a large potential for abuse by agencies with a history of such

abuse.

One pundit il lustrated the potential dangers of aggregating personallyidentifiable information by researching and publishing the names, home

addresses, and home phone numbers of Poindexter and several of his

neighbors. He urged readers to contact Poindexter to let him know

what they think of Poindexter's plans for their personally identifiable

information. Perhaps that's why the CVs and biographies of TIA project

managers have disappeared from the IAO website, along with the

chilling graphic.

Whether or not DARPA keeps Poindexter on amidst the controversy

about his role in TIA is irrelevant. Total Information Awareness projects

will have a life of their own and they set the stage for creation of a Big

Brother-style information security apparatus that will irrevocably alter

our democracy.

Times are tough. The economy is weak and government spending may

be the only way to keep many corporations afloat or even prosperous.

Writer Bruce Sterling refers to the President's Critical Infrastructure

Protection Board "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" plan drafted

in September 2002 as the " Cybersecurity Industrial Complex."

Questions remain: How many of the laws passed by Congress and the

programs funded by the U.S. government will actually increase security

and decrease the threat of terrorism? How many are just traditional

pork-barrel payoffs to stimulate the economy and enrich the wealthy?

How many will senselessly abridge our civil liberties and our quality oflife in the process?

What we need are sensible strategies for increasing security while

ensuring privacy so that we protect Americans not only from terrorism

but also from unwarranted abrogation of our civil liberties.

Nota bene

As this column was going to press (January 15, 2003), a broad coalition

of advocacy groups from across the political spectrum announced its

opposition to TIA. In a letter to the House Armed Services Committee,

nine groups including EFF, the ACLU, and the American Conservative

Union said: "Congress should not allow the Defense Department to

develop unilaterally a surveillance tool that would invade the privacy ofinnocent people inside the United States." At the same time, U. S.

Senator Russell Feingold has introduced legislation calling for a

moratorium on data mining, the Data-Mining Moratorium Act of 2003.

"The untested and controversial intelligence procedure known as

data-mining is capable of maintaining extensive files containing both

public and private records on each and every American," Feingold said.

Further updates (February 19, 2003)


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The government has proposed even wider expansion of survei llance

powers. As Decalan McCullagh reports on CNET: "Attorney General

John Ashcroft wants even more power to snoop on the Internet, spy on

private conversations and install secret microphones, spyware and

keystroke loggers."

Read the Center for Public Integrity's analysis of "PATRIOT 2" and EFF's

commentary on "Son of Patriot."

The New York Timesreports that Members of a House-SenateConference have adopted Senator Wyden's Amendment limiting the

Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Funding will terminate for

the program unless DARPA submits a detailed report to Congress within

90 days. Additionally, TIA cannot be deployed against US Citizens

without Congressional approval. For more information, see the EPIC

TIA Page.

For more information:

" Homeland Insecurity: Is Your Privacy in Danger? " San Francisco

Chronicle, December 12, 2002

" The Domestic Spying Renaissance " Security Focus, June 24, 2002

" Cities Say No to Federal Snooping " Wired News, December 19, 2002

(and on the same page in the right column) "Overview of Changes to

Your Legal Rights"Associated Press.

EFF analysis of TIA

EFF Action Alerts on TIA

About the Author

As founder and first Executive Director of the

Online Policy Group, Will Doherty '85 has

demonstrated a strong commitment to protecting

and expanding rights of access, privacy, and safety

on the Internet. Doherty has also worked since

January 2001 as the Media Relations Director of the Electronic Frontier

Foundation.

Prior to founding the Online Policy Group, he served as the Director of

Online Community Development at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against

Defamation, where he focused on the online r ights of lesbian, gay,

bisexual, and transgender communities. He managed GLAAD's Digital

Media Resource Center in San Francisco, cultivating strategic

partnerships in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Will Doherty has twenty years of experience as a computing consultantand online activist. In the early 1980's, he worked on the ARPANET,

precursor to the Internet. He served as the Globalization Operations

Manager at Sybase, Inc., and as a Localization Program Manager and a

Technical Writer for Sun Microsystems, Inc. He has designed and

implemented Internet strategies and websites for dozens of nonprofit

community and advocacy organizations. In addition to a BS in

Computer Science and Writing from MIT, Will has an MBA from Golden


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Gate University.

What Matters is a guest opinion column written by a different MIT

alumnus or alumna. The views expressed are entirely those of the

author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alumni

Association or MIT. Interested in writing a column? Email

[email protected].

2010 MIT 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139,617-253-8200


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WhatMatters_January2003.MITalumpublication