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Posted on 03/31/2004 10:34:51 PM PST by quidnunc
The 9/11 Commission hearings have focused public attention again on the intelligence failures leading up to the September attacks. Yet since 9/11, virtually every proposal to use intelligence more effectively — to connect the dots — has been shot down by left- and right-wing libertarians as an assault on "privacy." The consequence has been devastating: Just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction.
The privacy advocates — who range from liberal groups focused on electronic privacy, such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to traditional conservative libertarians, such as Americans for Tax Reform — are fixated on a technique called "data mining." By now, however, they have killed enough different programs that their operating principle can only be formulated as this: No use of computer data or technology anywhere at any time for national defense, if there's the slightest possibility that a rogue use of that technology will offend someone's sense of privacy. They are pushing intelligence agencies back to a pre-9/11 mentality, when the mere potential for a privacy or civil liberties controversy trumped security concerns.
The privacy advocates' greatest triumph was shutting down the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Goaded on by New York Times columnist William Safire, the advocates presented the program as the diabolical plan of John Poindexter, the former Reagan national security adviser and director of Pentagon research, to spy on "every public and private act of every American" — in Mr. Safire's words.
The advocates' distortion of TIA was unrelenting. Most egregiously, they concealed TIA's purpose: to prevent another attack on American soil by uncovering the electronic footprints terrorists leave as they plan and rehearse their assaults. Before terrorists strike, they must enter the country, receive funds, case their targets, buy supplies, and send phone and e-mail messages. Many of those activities will leave a trail in electronic databases. TIA researchers hoped that cutting-edge computer analysis could find that trail in government intelligence files and, possibly, in commercial databases as well.
TIA would have been the most advanced application yet of "data mining," a young technology which attempts to make sense of the explosion of data in government, scientific and commercial databases. Through complex algorithms, the technique can extract patterns or anomalies in data collections that a human analyst could not possibly discern. Public health authorities have mined medical data to spot the outbreak of infectious disease, and credit-card companies have found fraudulent credit-card purchases with the method, among other applications.
But according to the "privacy community," data mining was a dangerous, unconstitutional technology, and the Bush administration had to be stopped from using it for any national-security or law-enforcement purpose. By September 2003, the hysteria against TIA had reached a fevered pitch and Congress ended the research project entirely, before learning the technology's potential and without a single "privacy violation" ever having been committed.
The overreaction is stunning. Without question, TIA represented a radical leap ahead in both data-mining technology and intelligence analysis. Had it used commercial data, it would have given intelligence agencies instantaneous access to a volume of information about the public that had previously only been available through slower physical searches. As with any public or private power, TIA's capabilities could have been abused — which is why the Pentagon research team planned to build in powerful safeguards to protect individual privacy. But the most important thing to remember about TIA is this: It would have used only data to which the government was already legally entitled. It differed from existing law-enforcement and intelligence techniques only in degree, not kind. Pattern analysis — the heart of data mining — is conventional crime-solving, whether the suspicious patterns are spotted on a crime pin map, on a city street, or in an electronic database.
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(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
That might be the reason he's free to speak his mind.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Bingo. Very well put. I am happy to see that almost all the posts on this thread, despite being on a "right wing extremist" web site, (lol) are decidedly in favor of civil liberties. Conservatives are by definition the true guardians of civil liberties.
The bottom line is clear: The privacy battalions oppose not just particular technologies, but technological innovation itself. Any effort to use computerized information more efficiently will be tarred with the predictable buzzwords: "surveillance," "Orwellian," "Poindexter." This Luddite approach to counterterrorism could not be more ominous. The volume of information in government intelligence files long ago overwhelmed the capacity of humans to understand it. Agents miss connections between people and events every day. Machine analysis is essential in an intelligence tidal wave.
Before the privacy onslaught, scientists and intelligence officials were trying to find ways of identifying those fanatics who seek to destroy America before they strike again. Now many avenues are closed to them. This despite the fact that proposals for assessing risk in such areas as aviation do not grow out of an omnivorous desire to "spy on citizens" but out of a concrete need to protect people from a clear threat. And since 9/11, no one's "privacy rights" have been violated by terror pre-emption research.
The "privocrats" will rightly tell you that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Trouble is, they're aiming their vigilance at the wrong target.
The key is this: TIPS and Capps II target PATTERNS, not PEOPLE. This is NOT a privacy issue but rather a national security measure the 9/11 Panel should be recommending!
N.B. Better to post the entire article.
We are satisfied knowing that the Trotskyite and UberConservative civil libertarians will enjoy their intact privacy at the base of the rubble of the former Sears Tower.
Who both wrongly claimed that TIA was part of the Homeland Security Act (it wasn't) and significantly overstated the data that TIA was slated to gather.
There are pros and cons to TIA's demise. We have seen that the feds had a few scattered data points that might have revealed the developing 9/11 plot before it happened. What the feds should do first, before attempting to create a system such as TIA, is to figure out how to mine their existing data stream effectively. Throwing more data into a process that already is failing accomplishes nothing.
In addition, one only needs to look at the limited effectiveness of marketing models to see that commercially-available data that TIA would use would not be very effective for the much more stringent and demanding task of narrowing modelling down to the individual level to predict possible criminal behavior. There may be credit-card transactions that show someone spent $127.38 at Wal-Mart - but what did they buy? Shopping at Wal-Mart can yield some predictive value to a marketer, who may generate behavior segments holding tens of thousands of individuals linked by shopping and financial behavior, but it sure isn't useful for criminal investigations.
Having said that, the political reaction to TIA and associated data mining proposals has probably significantly set back efforts to improve data mining capabilities of the feds - and those efforts have a long way to go. For all the fancy talk about data mining, much of it is a mix of drudgery and the application of insights into data. The classic example of failed data mining is the DC sniper database. The Caprice used by the snipers was in the database several times - but it apparently didn't occur to anyone to run a SELECT COUNT(*) on the database for all instances where a license plate appears multiple times, sort the list descending and start working down it. That kind of mining is SQL 101 stuff - but apparently beyond the grasp of the investigators for that case.
In addition, Poindexter had proposed two privacy initiatives as part of TIA - and those have been thrown by the wayside. My primary objective to TIA was that it would be worthless for modelling possible terrorist activity, and instead could have been used as a lookup database, where the name of a polical opponent is entered and all his data is dumped out to use for intimidation. Poindexter proposed that identification information be hidden (a process already used by financial organizations, who separate name data from credit and behavioral data until they are ready to make an offer of credit). And the only way to access the name would be through a court order, which means the data around the name would have to reach some kind of probable cause threshhold.
When it is all said and done, the parties involved in this debate all need to change their approach. The fedgov needs to learn to walk before it tries to run when it comes to data mining. The critics need to tone down the hysterics, learn something about data and databases themselves, offer constructive criticism and make sure that their activism doesn't cause more harm than good. And the politicians need to exercise some leadership.
Unfortunately that's correct. I am of the same mind. Which is why it is utterly important that dims just don't get into the WH. I know that's a pipe dream, but that's the reality. It is a tough problem.
Thank God your opinion of this is in the minority here on FR. Quit living in fear. Otherwise the terrorists have succeeded.
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