The BushAdministration won’tgive up on trying tospy on us at everyturn.
Agency Using Flawed Program To Connect Intelligence DotsBy Cliff MontgomeryThe government‘s top intelligence agency apparently is building a computerized system to search vast stores of private information about U.S. citizens and visitors alike.The system, called Tangram, is run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and is in the early research phases. It is an effort to uncover activities which look like terrorist planning, and is being tested–in part–with government intelligence that may contain information on both U.S. citizens and visitors.The details of the program are contained in an unclassified document which National Journal magazine discovered on a government contracting Web site. The document, called a “proposer’s information packet,” is a technical description of Tangram written for potential contractors who might help design and test the new system.It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those that create “suspicion scores” for suspected terrorists by analyzing huge databases of government intelligence, as well as records of suspects’ private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.But intelligence and privacy experts who reviewed the document told the National Journal that it reaffirms their suspicions that many computerized, so-called “terrorist-profiling methods” are to a great extent ineffective.The document was written by officials in the research-and-development section of the DNI, and offers a surprisingly candid analysis of intelligence agencies’ fits and starts in their various efforts to profile terrorists through data mining. Among the detailed problems? Researchers have yet to move beyond “guilt-by-association models” which link suspected terrorists to other, possibly innocent people, all in an effort to rank the individuals by level of suspicion.”To date, the predominant approaches have used a guilt-by-association model to derive suspicion scores,” states the Tangram document. “In the cases where we have knowledge of a seed entity [a known person] in an unknown group, we have been very successful at detecting the entire group. However, in the absence of a known seed entity, how do we score a person if nothing is known about their associates? In such an instance, guilt-by-association fails.”To be fair, it does make more sense to look at such associations than counting on random searches. But there is another problem with the technique. “Guilt-by-association” is a known fallacy of logic, since it surmises that a suspect’s associates must know something of his questionable activities. It may indeed sometimes lead to breakthrough discoveries of terror circles; but more often than not a “guilt-by-association” approach that’s not being tightly controlled also leads to numbers of innocent people being investigated for no other reason than that they know a certain suspect.To distinguish the terrorist from the innocent associate, a system as broad as Tangram must utilize numerous databases that contain private information about innocent Americans, including credit card transactions, communications records, and even Internet purchases, say experts.”There is no other way that they could do this,” David Holtzman, former chief technology officer of Network Solutions–the company that runs the Internet’s domain-naming system–and author of the book Privacy Lost, told the Journal.”They want to investigate real-time ways of spotting patterns” that might indicate terrorist activity, said Holtzman. “Telephone calls, for instance, would be an obvious thing you’d feed into this.”The Tangram document never mentions privacy protections or any in-house process for monitoring Tangram’s use to guard against abuse. In an Journal interview, Tim Edgar, the deputy civil liberties protection officer for the DNI director, said only that Tangram “is a research-and-development program. We have been assured that it’s not deployed for operational use.”In other words, there cannot be a problem with civil liberties…because others have told us so.Asked whether the data used to test Tangram contains information about U.S. persons–defined as U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens–Edgar said, “It’s not being tested with any data that has unminimized information about U.S. persons in it.” Minimization procedures are used by intelligence agencies to expunge people’s names from official reports; the names are replaced with anonymous designations, such as U.S. Person No. 1.But this simply changes the name of individuals to numbers. Such a change does not actually protect personal information or civil liberties, as a person with the proper clearance and connections should easily be able to discover which number belongs to which name.Tangram has also drawn the wrath of technology and privacy experts because of its links to Total Information Awareness (TIA), a controversial research program started by the Pentagon in 2002. TIA was also designed to detect patterns of terrorist behavior. Congress ended all public funding for the program in 2003 because of concerns over possible violations of civil liberties.The Republican-run Congress quietly allowed TIA research to continue through the classified intelligence budget, however. But that’s for another article.
