Refuting 'Big Brother' Charge.
By Tom Brune
Washington Bureau
November 21, 2002
Washington -- Seeking to allay concerns of government spying on citizens, a
Pentagon official yesterday said technology being developed to identify
terrorists by mining millions of private and public records will be subject
to privacy and other laws that protect rights.
But the legal and privacy implications of the new, far-reaching technology
project -- which the Pentagon calls the Total Information Awareness System
-- remain unclear at this point, said Justice Department officials and
privacy advocates yesterday.
The existence of the project came to light a week ago, creating a storm of
charges that the Pentagon is creating a tool that would in effect spy on
citizens, raising the specter of Big Brother and near-destruction of privacy.
Adding to the complaints has been the fact that the project was originated
and is run by John Poindexter, who was convicted on five counts of lying to
Congress in the Iran-Contra weapons-for-hostages scandal, though the
conviction later was overturned.
For the first time yesterday, Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge, a Defense
Department undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics,
officially outlined the project in a news media briefing at the Pentagon,
seeking to downplay its threat to liberties.
Aldridge said that the project had a $10-million budget this year but that
future funding had not been decided. He said it had three parts: rapid
language translation and speech-to-text ability, so that other countries'
records could be examined; data-mining of various transactions and records;
and collaborative reasoning-and-decision-making tools.
The data-mining section has raised the most concern, since the transaction
records of many innocent citizens and individuals would be accessed and
analyzed by the system in its search for terrorists.
Already, government agencies have begun mining commercial databases in
pursuit of terrorists, especially in attempts to track financial
transactions that might be linked to the funding of terrorism abroad, say
federal officials and libertarians.
But the Total Information Awareness System would go beyond traditional
data-mining and would include commercial, government and possibly private
records, said the Defense Department's Information Awareness Office, which
oversees the project.
In fact, the project is so ambitious, some advocates and high-tech experts
wonder if it will even work, given that there are so many different
computer and information systems, and there is still data not online or
computerized in a timely way -- or at all.
Among the records that would be collected and combed through, Aldridge
said, are passports, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, credit cards,
airline tickets, rental cars, gun purchases, chemical purchases, and those
detailing events such as arrests or suspicious activities. "You're looking
for trends in transactions that are associated with some potential
terrorist act," Aldridge said. "And you're trying to put those pieces
together."
A terrorist entering the country might get a visa from the State
Department; then he might get a driver's license, take flying lessons, buy
a lot of chemicals and purchase a gun, Aldridge said.
The experimental prototype now being developed, he said, would not use
actual data involving citizens, but would use made-up information.
Aldridge said the Defense Department would not use the technology once it
was developed, but would turn it over to intelligence and law enforcement
agencies, governed by laws to protect individual privacy.
Law enforcement officials have taken a wait-and-see attitude.
The Justice Department has not gotten any information about the project
from the Pentagon and thus cannot comment, spokesman Bryan Sierra said. The
FBI had no official comment on the project either. But one FBI official
said he wondered how the bureau could gain approval to use the system
without first having evidence of criminal activity or suspects.
Privacy groups have other concerns. This week, a letter signed by more than
50 privacy and libertarian groups urged Senate leaders to stop the
development of the system because it will have no built-in oversight or
accountability.
"There are few if any rules that govern this," said James X. Dempsey of the
civil liberties group Center for Democracy and Technology. And the laws
that do exist, such as the 1974 Privacy Act, are too technologically out of
date to address it, he said.
"One of the issues is that we don't know what data we talk about," he said.
"How the government gets it. How to ensure it's accurate. How a person gets
off the list if they pop up as a possible terrorist."
Poindexter has said a panel within the Pentagon has been appointed to study
how to preserve privacy, and discussions have begun with the National
Academy of Sciences for a longer-range study.
