Posted on 04/11/2003 11:08:59 AM PDT by Pro-Bush
Pentagon (news - web sites) researchers this month completed the first set of test data for the controversial Total Information Awareness system, a key technologist for the project says.
Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), said at an IBM-sponsored conference on data privacy in Almaden, Calif., this week that Americans must trade some privacy for security. "Three thousand people died on 9/11. When you consider the potential effect of a terrorist attack against the privacy of an entire population, there has to be some trade-off," Dyer says.
Total Information Awareness, an experimental computer system being developed by Darpa under Vice Adm. John Poindexter, seeks to scan information about passport, visa, and work-permit applications, plus information about purchases of airline tickets, hotel rooms, over-the-counter drugs, and chemicals--both here and abroad--to discern "signature" patterns of terrorist behavior. Congressional leaders have criticized the system's potential to spy on Americans and agreed to restrict further research and development without consulting Congress.
Signals of potential terrorist activity are likely to be weak amid a field of data "noise," Dyer says. TIA is designed to seek patterns that could indicate terrorist behavior while preserving people's anonymity, he adds. "We're testing our hypothesis on nothing but synthetic data."
Total Information Awareness, the keystone project of Darpa's Information Awareness Office, incorporates language-translation, data-searching and pattern-recognition, and decision-support technologies, according to the project's Web site. According to Dyer, the system won't scan "irrelevant" personal information about Americans, such as medical records, but could consider records of over-the-counter drug purchases, which could indicate planning of a bioterrorist attack.
Dyer says the initial experiment data set, completed this month, could also consider relationships between purchases of certain chemicals, whether the buyer or a family member was involved in an activity such as farming that could explain a benign reason for the purchase, and where the purchase was made.
And what if Wal-Mart refuses - does the government compel Wal-Mart to turn over customer purchase records? And even if Wal-Mart provides the data, you'd need to capture purchase-level data from EVERY retailer and wholesaler IN THE COUNTRY - a mammoth project that would dwarf the Y2K preparations in IT.
Except that, in the case of firearms purchases...that isn't an option.
Wrong. I provide my name for the background check - but I can pay cash at the register once I have passed the background check. Paid cash for the last gun I bought back in 1999.
However, most of the time the discount card data is not shared at the purchase level with marketers - so for the government to compel a grocery store to provide them with discount-card data would often be a violation of the agreement between the customer and the store upon issuance of the card. And there is still always the option of paying cash and not using a discount card.
They won't. Their policy is if you have the cash, you're in their extranet--pay for play.
And even if Wal-Mart provides the data, you'd need to capture purchase-level data from EVERY retailer and wholesaler IN THE COUNTRY - a mammoth project that would dwarf the Y2K preparations in IT.
It would have the salutary effect of ending the H1B whingeing :o)
Wrong. I provide my name for the background check - but I can pay cash at the register once I have passed the background check. Paid cash for the last gun I bought back in 1999.
Wal-Mart will still track it, believe it or not--they just don't do it in a fashion that's obvious to you. (They have to worry about lawsuits and the like.)
Well, the way TIA is being billed, names would be kept separate from demographic and financial data, and it would take a warrant to get names that match TIA models. So in order to issue a warrant, probable cause would need to be provided. So PC is still in play here.
Wal-Mart simply tracks it by filling out their federal fireams forms. Not live, not electronic. There is no tracking at the register.
I don't think they can do it. This is a major headache in any data wharehouseing operation. And no one has every tried to collect data from such wide ranging sources. It's not just a technical problem that can be overcome with some clever engineering, even though that's a massive hurdle. It's also administrative, everybody involved in supplying the data would have to give their total cooperation.
Didn't Mr. Franklin have something to say about that?
That's because you're a s**t eating, freedom hating bureaucrat Doug.
The issue I mentioned is not a matter of trusting the government. If you read the form when you sign up for many discount cards, the retailer specifies limits on how your purchase data will be shared. Releasing it to the government would be a violation of that agreement. And it's really moot anyway, as one can simply pay cash and not use a discount card, so the only people who would have data transmitted from discount card databases would be those who don't care, as you do.
Look at the current relationship between the federal government and the banking industry. Your data is transparently available to the feds under many circumstances, and court orders are easily obtained in any case.
A court order is still required, which limits the ability to obtain data in bulk - and, in addition, probable cause to obtain a court order needs to come from other sources, not the financial data itself.
Consider the library situation that has developed.
And libraries are nuking records as a result. That law of unintended consequences thang that is a rider on every bill passed by Congress but that is never considered during debate.
I'm sorry, but ideals don't seem to be in place any longer with regard to privacy from government intrusion.
I've developed an alternative view towards this problem. Gun grabbers sometimes postulate the idea of keeping guns legal but outlawing ammo. I think we should reverse that concept regarding personal data and its use by the feds - we really can't do too much about the mountains of data that are legally available from private sources (the ammo) - but we CAN institute controls on governmental databases and analytical tools that use this data (the guns). So IMO the best approach is to worry less about the minuitae of the data (where the feds can bury data-gathering mechanisms deep in legislation where only the most masochistic wonks can find them) and instead concentrate on review of the databases, which are much larger projects that sooner or later appear on the political radar screens.
It's staggering to contemplate. How many business are in this country? 20 million or so. That's 20 million data feeds. Every POS system in the country would have to be re-programmed to provide a standard data extract, and that data would have to be transmitted, loaded, checked and then merged. The way I look at it, the IRS can't even implement tax systems where almost all the data arrives with a common key. How are the feds going to handle data coming from 20 million point sources with no common key, and deliver finished data in anything remotely resembling timeliness? I've matched data from large sets for a living, and 80 percent is a good match rate - fine for marketing, but completely inadequate for an investigative tool. The gaps in this process are absolutely HUGE, and any terrorist with a brain will have no trouble avoiding detection.
I buy gas every day with my current commute. I'm too lazy to walk into the convenience store unless I gotta hit the loo...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.