-Caveat Lector-
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From: "H.F.C. Buma" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: IUFO: Many Tools of Big Brother Are Up and Running, The New
York
Times
Date sent: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 18:46:30 +0100
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December 23, 2002
Associated Press
Charlie Moss, a highway operations technician, monitors traffic flow in
Hanover, Md. Such bits of oversight are already ubiquitous.
Many Tools of Big Brother Are Up and Running
By JOHN MARKOFF and JOHN SCHWARTZ
380b84.jpgn the Pentagon research effort to detect terrorism by
electronically monitoring the civilian population, the most remarkable
detail may be this: Most of the pieces of the system are already in place.
Because of the inroads the Internet and other digital network technologies
have made into everyday life over the last decade, it is increasingly
possible to amass Big Brother-like surveillance powers through Little
Brother means. The basic components include everyday digital technologies
like e-mail, online shopping and travel booking, A.T.M. systems, cellphone
networks, electronic toll-collection systems and credit-card payment terminals.
In essence, the Pentagon's main job would be to spin strands of software
technology that would weave these sources of data into a vast electronic
dragnet.
Technologists say the types of computerized data sifting and pattern
matching that might flag suspicious activities to government agencies and
coordinate their surveillance are not much different from programs already
in use by private companies. Such programs spot unusual credit card
activity, for example, or let people at multiple locations collaborate on a
project.
The civilian population, in other words, has willingly embraced the
technical prerequisites for a national surveillance system that Pentagon
planners are calling
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=TOT.WS>Total
Information Awareness. The development has a certain historical resonance
because it was the Pentagon's research agency that in the 1960's financed
the technology that led directly to the modern Internet. Now the same
agency — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenccy, or Darpa — is
relying on commercial technology that has evolved ffrom the network it
pioneered.
The first generation of the Internet — called the Arpanet — €” consisted of
electronic mail and file transfer software that connected people to people.
The second generation connected people to databases and other information
via the World Wide Web. Now a new generation of software connects computers
directly to computers.
Nicole Bengiveno/NYT; Laura Pedrick for NYT
From cellphone conversations to tollbooth collections systems, a great
deal of apparently innocuous information could reveal patterns when
filtered through software. The idea of creating a vast electronic dragnet
is one some consider outlandishly futuristic, though others say it is
attainable.
Associated Press
The Portland International Jetport captured this now-famous image of two
Sept. 11 hijackers on their way to Boston to catch American Airlines Flight
11.
And that is the key to the Total Information Awareness project, which is
overseen by John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser under
President Ronald Reagan. Dr. Poindexter was convicted in 1990 of a felony
for his role in the Iran-contra affair, but that conviction was overturned
by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his
testimony before Congress about the case.
Although Dr. Poindexter's system has come under widespread criticism from
Congress and civil liberties groups, a prototype is already in place and
has been used in tests by military intelligence organizations.
Total Information Awareness could link for the first time such different
electronic sources as video feeds from airport surveillance cameras, credit
card transactions, airline reservations and telephone calling records. The
data would be filtered through software that would constantly look for
suspicious patterns of behavior.
The idea is for law enforcement or intelligence agencies to be alerted
immediately to patterns in otherwise unremarkable sets of data that might
indicate threats, allowing rapid reviews by human analysts. For example, a
cluster of foreign visitors who all took flying lessons in separate parts
of the country might not attract attention. Nor would it necessarily raise
red flags if all those people reserved airline tickets for the same day.
But a system that could detect both sets of actions might raise suspicions.
Some computer scientists wonder whether the system can work. "This wouldn't
have been possible without the modern Internet, and even now it's a
daunting task," said Dorothy Denning, a professor in the Department of
Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Part
of the challenge, she said, is knowing what to look for. "Do we really know
enough about the precursors to terrorist activity?" she said. "I don't
think we're there yet."
The early version of the Total Information Awareness system employs a
commercial software collaboration program called Groove. It was developed
in 2000 by Ray Ozzie, a well-known software designer who is the inventor of
Lotus Notes. Groove makes it possible for analysts at many different
government agencies to share intelligence data instantly, and it links
specialized programs that are designed to look for patterns of suspicious
behavior.
Total Information Awareness also takes advantage of a simple and
fundamental software technology called Extended Markup Language, or XML,
that is at the heart of the third generation of Internet software. It was
created by software designers at companies like
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=MSFT>Microsoft,
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=SUNW>Sun
Microsystems and
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=IBM>I.B.M.,
as well as independent Silicon Valley programmers.
The markup language allows data that has long been locked in isolated
databases, known in the industry as silos, to be translated into a kind of
universal language that can be read and used by many different systems.
Information made compatible in this way can be shared among thousands, or
even hundreds of thousands, of computers in ways that all of them can
understand.
It is XML, a refinement of the Internet's original World Wide Web scheme,
that has made it possible to consider welding thousands of databases
together without centralizing the information. Computer scientists said
that without such new third-generation Web technologies, it would have
never been possible to conceive of the Total Information Awareness system,
which is intended to ferret out the suspicious intentions of a handful of
potential terrorists from the humdrum everyday electronic comings and
goings of millions of average Americans.
Civil libertarians have questioned whether the government has the legal or
constitutional grounds to conduct such electronic searches. And other
critics have called it an outlandishly futuristic and ultimately unworkable
scheme on technical grounds.
But on the latter point, technologists disagree. "It's well grounded in the
best current theory about scalable systems," said Ramano Rao, chief
technology officer at Inxight, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company that develops
text-searching software. "It uses all the right buzzwords."
People close to the Pentagon's research program said Dr. Poindexter was
acutely aware of the power and the invasiveness of his experimental
surveillance system. In private conversations this summer, according to
several Department of Defense contractors, he raised the possibility that
the control of the Total Information Awareness system should be placed
under the jurisdiction of an independent, nongovernmental organization like
the Red Cross because of the potential for abuse.
Dr. Poindexter declined to be interviewed for this article. A Darpa
spokeswoman, Jan Walker, wrote in an e-mail reply to questions that "we
don't recall ever talking about" having a nongovernmental organization
operate the Total Information Awareness program and that "we've not held
any discussions with" such an organization.
The idea of using an independent organization to control a technology that
has a high potential for abuse has been raised by previous administrations.
An abortive plan to create a backdoor surveillance capability in encrypted
communications, known as Clipper, was introduced by the Clinton
administration in 1993. It called for keys to the code to be held by an
organization independent of the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies.
Speaking of Dr. Poindexter, John Arquilla, an expert at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey on unconventional warfare, said, "The
admiral is very concerned about the tension between security and civil
liberties." He added that because of the changing nature of warfare and the
threat of terrorism, the United States would be forced to make trade-offs
between individuals' privacy and national security.
"In an age of terror wars, we have to learn the middle path to craft the
security we need without incurring too great a cost on our civil
liberties," he said.
Computer scientists who work with Darpa said that Dr. Poindexter was an
enthusiastic backer of a Darpa-sponsored advisory group that had been
initiated by a Microsoft researcher, Eric Horvitz, in October 2001 in the
wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The group, which was composed of 41 computer scientists, policy experts and
government officials, met three times to explore whether it was possible to
employ sophisticated data-mining technologies against potential terrorist
attacks while protecting individuals' privacy.
A number of the scientists proposed "black box" surveillance systems that
would alert human intelligence analysts about suspicious patterns. Once the
alerts were issued in such a system, they suggested, legal processes like
those used for wiretapping could be employed.
But a number of the scientists and policy experts who attended the meetings
were skeptical that technical safeguards would be adequate to ensure that
such a system would not be abused.
The debate is a healthy one, said Don Upson, who is senior vice president
of the government business unit of a software company in Fairfax, Va.,
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=WEBM>webMethods,
and the former secretary of technology for Virginia.
"I'm glad Darpa is doing this because somebody has to start defining what
the rules are going to be" about how and when to use data, he said. "I
believe we're headed down the path of setting the parameters of how we're
going to use information."
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>The New York
Times
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"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator."
-GW Bush during a photo-op with Congressional leaders on
12/18/2000. As broadcast on CNN and available in transcript on
their website http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0012/18/nd.01.html
Steve Wingate, Webmaster
ANOMALOUS IMAGES AND UFO FILES
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