http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nsa-police.html
The New Thought Police
The NSA Wants to Know How You Think—Maybe Even What You Think
By James Bamford
Posted 01.01.09
NOVA
The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George
Orwell's Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial
intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are
thinking.
With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the
device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex
questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is
collected—through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks
like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation,
Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records—
it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what
they are doing, but what and how they think.
The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher
has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful
weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.
The National Security Agency's eavesdropping on phone calls, e-mails,
and other communications skyrocketed after 9/11. But that was only the
beginning of its high-tech invasiveness, as Bamford reports. Above,
NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Enlarge Photo credit:
Courtesy NSA
Getting Aquaint
Known as Aquaint, which stands for "Advanced QUestion Answering for
INTelligence," the project was run for many years by John Prange, an
NSA scientist at the Advanced Research and Development Activity.
Headquartered in Room 12A69 in the NSA's Research and Engineering
Building at 1 National Business Park, ARDA was set up by the agency to
serve as a sort of intelligence community DARPA, the place where
former Reagan national security advisor John Poindexter's infamous
Total Information Awareness project was born. [Editor's note: TIA was
a short-lived project founded in 2002 to apply information technology
to counter terrorist and other threats to national security.] Later
named the Disruptive Technology Office, ARDA has now morphed into the
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).
A sort of national laboratory for eavesdropping and other spycraft,
IARPA will move into its new 120,000-square-foot home in 2009. The
building will be part of the new M Square Research Park in College
Park, Maryland. A mammoth two million-square-foot, 128-acre complex,
it is operated in collaboration with the University of Maryland.
"Their budget is classified, but I understand it's very well funded,"
said Brian Darmody, the University of Maryland's assistant vice
president of research and economic development, referring to IARPA.
"They'll be in their own building here, and they're going to grow.
Their mission is expanding."
Bamford calls the widespread (and warrantless) monitoring of average
citizens' communications overseen by the NSA "the surveillance-
industrial complex." Enlarge Photo credit: © 2009 WGBH Educational
Foundation
If IARPA is the spy world's DARPA, Aquaint may be the reincarnation of
Poindexter's TIA. After a briefing by NSA Director Michael Hayden,
Vice President Dick Cheney, and CIA Director George Tenet of some of
the NSA's data mining programs in July 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller
IV, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a
concerned letter to Cheney. "As I reflected on the meeting today," he
said, "John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my
concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with
regard to security, technology, and surveillance."
Building "Hal"
The original goal of Aquaint, which dates back to the 1990s, was
simply to develop a sophisticated method of picking the right needles
out of a vast haystack of information and coming up with the answer to
a question. As with TIA, many universities were invited to contribute
brainpower to the project. But in the aftermath of the attacks on
9/11, with the creation of the NSA's secret warrantless eavesdropping
program and the buildup of massive databases, the project began taking
on a more urgent tone.
"Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most memorable character, HAL
9000. We are building HAL."
In a 2004 pilot project, a mass of data was gathered from news stories
taken from the New York Times, the AP news wire, and the English
portion of the Chinese Xinhua news wire covering 1998 to 2000. Then,
13 U.S. military intelligence analysts searched the data and came up
with a number of scenarios based on the material. Finally, using those
scenarios, an NSA analyst developed 50 topics, and in each of those
topics created a series of questions for Aquaint's computerized brain
to answer. "Will the Japanese use force to defend the Senkakus?" was
one. "What types of disputes or conflict between the PLA [People's
Liberation Army] and Hong Kong residents have been reported?" was
another. And "Who were the participants in this spy ring, and how are
they related to each other?" was a third. Since then, the NSA has
attempted to build both on the complexity of the system—more essay-
like answers rather than yes or no—and on attacking greater volumes of
data.
The NSA would essentially like to create the spy-agency equivalent of
"HAL 9000," the computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey that
converses with the astronaut David Bowman (played by Keir Dullea).
Enlarge Photo credit: © Sunset Boulevard/Corbis
"The technology behaves like a robot, understanding and answering
complex questions," said a former Aquaint researcher. "Think of 2001:
A Space Odyssey and the most memorable character, HAL 9000, having a
conversation with David. We are essentially building this system. We
are building HAL." A naturalized U.S. citizen who received her Ph.D.
from Columbia, the researcher worked on the program for several years
but eventually left due to moral concerns. "The system can answer the
question, 'What does X think about Y?'" she said. "Working for the
government is great, but I don't like looking into other people's
secrets. I am interested in helping people and helping physicians and
patients for the quality of people's lives." The researcher now
focuses on developing similar search techniques for the medical
community.
Thought policeman
A supersmart search engine, capable of answering complex questions
such as "What were the major issues in the last 10 presidential
elections?" would be very useful for the public. But that same
capability in the hands of an agency like the NSA—absolutely secret,
often above the law, resistant to oversight, and with access to
petabytes of private information about Americans—could be a privacy
and civil liberties nightmare. "We must not forget that the ultimate
goal is to transfer research results into operational use," said
Aquaint project leader John Prange, in charge of information
exploitation for IARPA.
In George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, a civil servant named Winston
Smith (played in the 1955 movie by Edmond O'Brien, seen here) loses
all privacy as Big Brother and his Thought Police bring him under
constant surveillance. Is the NSA today's Big Brother? Enlarge Photo
credit: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
Once up and running, the database of old newspapers could quickly be
expanded to include an inland sea of personal information scooped up
by the agency's warrantless data suction hoses. Unregulated, they
could ask it to determine which Americans might likely pose a security
risk—or have sympathies toward a particular cause, such as the antiwar
movement, as was done during the 1960s and 1970s. The Aquaint robospy
might then base its decision on the type of books a person purchased
online, or chat room talk, or websites visited—or a similar
combination of data. Such a system would have an enormous chilling
effect on everyone's everyday activities—what will the Aquaint
computer think if I buy this book, or go to that website, or make this
comment? Will I be suspected of being a terrorist or a spy or a
subversive?
Controlling brain waves
Collecting information, however, has always been far less of a problem
for the NSA than understanding it, and that means knowing the
language. To expand its linguistic capabilities, the agency
established another new organization, the Center for Advanced Study of
Language (CASL), and housed it in a building near IARPA at the M
Square Research Park. But far from simply learning the meaning of
foreign words, CASL, like Aquaint, attempts to find ways to get into
someone's mind and understand what he or she is thinking.
Like something out of a B-grade sci-fi movie, CASL is even training
employees to control their own brain waves.
One area of study is to attempt to determine if people are lying
simply by watching their behavior and listening to them speak.
According to one CASL document, "Many deception cues are difficult to
identify, particularly when they are subtle, such as changes in verb
tense or extremely brief facial expressions. CASL researchers are
studying these cues in detail with advanced measurement and
statistical analysis techniques in order to recommend ways to identify
deceptive cue combinations."
Ever watching and listening: a control room at NSA headquarters.
Enlarge Photo credit: © 2009 WGBH Educational Foundation
Another area of focus explores the "growing need to work with foreign
text that is incomplete," such as partly deciphered messages or a
corrupted hard drive or the intercept of only one side of a
conversation. The center is thus attempting to find ways to prod the
agency's cipher-brains to fill in the missing blanks. "In response,"
says the report, "CASL's cognitive neuroscience team has been studying
the cognitive basis of working memory's capacity for filling in
incomplete areas of text. They have made significant headway in this
research by using a powerful high-density electroencephalogram (EEG)
machine acquired in 2006." The effort is apparently directed at
discovering what parts of the brain are used when very good
cryptanalysts are able to guess correctly the missing words and
phrases in a message.
Like something out of a B-grade sci-fi movie, CASL is even trying to
turn dull minds into creative geniuses by training employees to
control their own brain waves: "The cognitive neuroscience team has
also been researching divergent thinking: creative, innovative and
flexible thinking valuable for language work. They are exploring ways
to improve divergent thinking using the EEG and neurobiological
feedback. A change in brain-wave activity is believed to be critical
for generating creative ideas, so the team trains its subjects to
change their brain-wave activity."
James Bamford is the author of three books on the National Security
Agency, including the 2008 The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA
From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, from which this article
was adapted with kind permission of Doubleday. Bamford coproduced,
with Scott Willis, NOVA's "The Spy Factory," which was based on this
book.
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