http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16741&ch=infotech
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
The Total Information Awareness Project Lives On
Technology behind the Pentagon's controversial data-mining project
has been acquired by NSA, and is probably in use.
By Mark Williams
In April, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the advocacy
organization for citizens' digital rights, filed evidence to support
its class-action lawsuit alleging that telecom giant AT&T gave the
National Security Agency (NSA), the ultra-secret U.S. agency that's
the world's largest espionage organization, unfettered access to
Americans' telephone and Internet communications. The lawsuit is one
more episode in the public controversy that erupted in December 2005,
when the New York Times revealed that, following September 11,
President Bush authorized a far-reaching NSA surveillance program
that included warrantless electronic eavesdropping on telephone calls
and e-mails of individuals within the United States.
Critics charged that the Bush administration had violated both the
Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against
unwarranted search or seizure, and the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which requires eavesdropping
warrants to be obtained from a special court of judges empowered for
that purpose.
In February 2006, the controversy intensified. Reports emerged that
component technologies of the supposedly defunct Total Information
Awareness (TIA) project -- established in 2002 by the Pentagon's
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop advanced
information technology to counter terrorists, then terminated by
Congress in 2003 because of widespread criticism that it would create
"Orwellian" mass surveillance -- had been acquired by the NSA.
Washington's lawmakers ostensibly killed the TIA project in Section
8131 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal 2004.
But legislators wrote a classified annex to that document which
preserved funding for TIA's component technologies, if they were
transferred to other government agencies, say sources who have seen
the document, according to reports first published in The National
Journal. Congress did stipulate that those technologies should only
be used for military or foreign intelligence purposes against
non-U.S. citizens. Still, while those component projects' names were
changed, their funding remained intact, sometimes under the same contracts.
Thus, two principal components of the overall TIA project have
migrated to the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA),
which is housed somewhere among the 60-odd buildings of "Crypto
City," as NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD, is nicknamed. One of
the TIA components that ARDA acquired, the Information Awareness
Prototype System, was the core architecture that would have
integrated all the information extraction, analysis, and
dissemination tools developed under TIA. According to The National
Journal, it was renamed "Basketball." The other, Genoa II, used
information technologies to help analysts and decision makers
anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks. It was renamed "Topsail."
Has the NSA been employing those TIA technologies in its surveillance
within the United States? And what exactly is the agency doing, anyway?
The hearings that the Senate Judiciary Committee convened in February
to consider the NSA's surveillance gave some clues. Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales, maintaining the administration's defense against
charges that it violated the Fourth Amendment and FISA, told
senators, firstly, that Article II of the U.S. Constitution granted a
president authority to conduct such monitoring and, secondly, that
the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) passed after September
11 specified that the president could "use all necessary and
appropriate force" to prevent future terrorist acts. Regarding FISA,
Gonzalez claimed, the NSA had sidestepped its requirements to obtain
warrants for electronic eavesdropping in particular cases. But,
overall, the attorney general said, FISA worked well and the
authorities had used it increasingly. The available facts support
Gonzalez's contention: while the FISA court issued about 500 warrants
per year from 1979 through 1995, in 2004 (the last year for which
public records exist) 1,758 warrants were issued.
But when senators asked why, given the fact that FISA had provisions
by which government agents could wiretap first and seek warrants
later, the Bush administration had sidestepped its requirements at
all, Gonzalez claimed he couldn't elaborate for reasons of national security.
Former NASA director General Michael Hayden, in charge when the NSA's
surveillance program was initiated in 2002, was slightly more
forthcoming. FISA wasn't applicable in certain cases, he told the
senators, because the NSA's surveillance relied on what he called a
"subtly softer trigger" before full-scale eavesdropping began.
Hayden, who is nowadays the nation's second-highest ranking
intelligence official, as deputy director of national intelligence,
said he could answer further questions only in closed session.
Gonzalez's testimony that the government is making increased use of
FISA, together with his refusal to explain why it's inapplicable in
some cases -- even though retroactive warrants can be issued --
implies that the issue isn't simply that government agents may
sometimes want to act quickly. FISA rules demand that old-fashioned
"probable cause" be shown before the FISA court issues warrants for
electronic surveillance of a specific individual. Probable cause
would be inapplicable if NSA were engaged in the automated analysis
and data mining of telephone and e-mail communications in order to
target possible terrorism suspects.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T reveals,
NSA has access to the switches and records of most or all of the
nation's leading telecommunications companies. These companies'
resources are extensive: AT&T's data center in Kansas, for instance,
contains electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls over
several decades. Moreover, the majority of international
telecommunications nowadays no longer travel by satellite, but by
undersea fiber-optic cables, so many carriers route international
calls through their domestic U.S. switches.
With the telecom companies' compliance, the NSA can today tap into
those international communications far more easily than in the past,
and in real time (or close to it). With access to much of the world's
telecom traffic, the NSA's supercomputers can digitally vacuum up
every call placed on a network and apply an arsenal of data-mining
tools. Traffic analysis, together with social network theory, can
reveal patterns indiscernible to human analysts, possibly suggesting
terrorist activity. Content filtering, applying highly sophisticated
search algorithms and powerful statistical methods like Bayesian
analysis in tandem with machine learning, can search for particular
words or language combinations that may indicate terrorist communications.
Whether the specific technologies developed under TIA and acquired by
ARDA have actually been used in the NSA's domestic surveillance
programs -- rather than only for intelligence gathering overseas --
has not been proved. Still, descriptions of the two former TIA
programs that became Topsail and Basketball mirror descriptions of
ARDA and NSA technologies for analyzing vast streams of telephone and
e-mail communications. Furthermore, one project manager active in the
TIA program before it was terminated has gone on record to the effect
that, while TIA was still funded, its researchers communicated
regularly and maintained "good coordination" with their ARDA counterparts.
It's this latter fact that is most to the point. Whether or not those
specific TIA technologies were deployed for domestic U.S.
surveillance, technologies very much like them were. In 2002, for
instance, ARDA awarded $64 million in research contracts for a new
program called Novel Intelligence from Massive Data. Furthermore,
overall, a 2004 survey by the U.S. General Accounting Office, an
investigative arm of Congress, found federal agencies operating or
developing 199 data mining projects, with more than 120 programs
designed to collect and analyze large amounts of personal data on
individuals to predict their behavior. Since the accounting office
excluded most of the classified projects, the actual numbers would
likely have been far higher.
Beyond these programs, additionally, there exist all the data-mining
applications currently employed in the private sector for purposes
like detecting credit card fraud or predicting health risks for
insurance. All the information thus generated goes into databases
that, given sufficient government motivation or merely the normal
momentum of future history, may sooner or later be accessible to the
authorities.
How should data-mining technologies like TIA be regulated in a
democracy? It makes little sense to insist on rigid interpretations
of FISA. This isn't only because when the law was passed by Congress
30 years ago, terrorist threats on al Qaeda's scale did not yet exist
and technological developments hadn't gone so far in potentially
giving unprecedented destructive power to small groups and even
individuals. Today's changed technological context, additionally,
invalidates FISA's basic assumptions.
In an essay published next month in the New York University Review of
Law and Security, titled "Whispering Wires and Warrantless Wiretaps:
Data Mining and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance," K. Taipale,
executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and
Technology Policy, points out that in 1978, when FISA was drafted, it
made sense to speak exclusively about intercepting a targeted
communication, where there were usually two known ends and a
dedicated communication channel that could be wiretapped.
With today's networks, however, data and increasingly voice
communications are broken into discrete packets. Intercepting such
communications requires that filters be deployed at various
communication nodes to scan all passing traffic with the hope of
finding and extracting the packets of interest and reassembling them.
Thus, even targeting a specific message from a known sender today
generally requires scanning and filtering the entire communication
flow in which it's embedded. Given that situation, FISA is clearly
inadequate because, Taipale argues, were it to be "applied strictly
according to its terms prior to any 'electronic surveillance' of
foreign communication flows passing through the U.S. or where there
is a substantial likelihood of intercepting U.S. persons, then no
automated monitoring of any kind could occur."
Taipale proposes not that FISA should be discarded, but that it
should be modified to allow for the electronic surveillance
equivalent of a Terry stop -- under U.S. law, the brief "stop and
frisk" of a person by a law enforcement officer based on the legal
standard of reasonable suspicion. In the context of automated data
mining, it would mean that if suspicion turned out to be unjustified,
after further monitoring, it would be discontinued. If, on the other
hand, continued suspicion was reasonable, then it would continue, and
at a certain point be escalated so that human agents would be called
in to decide whether a suspicious individual's identity should be
determined and a FISA warrant issued.
To attempt to maintain FISA and the rest of our current laws about
privacy without modifications to address today's changed
technological context, Taipale insists, amounts to a kind of
absolutism that is ultimately self-defeating. For example, one of the
technologies in the original TIA project, the Genisys Privacy
Protection program, was intended to enable greater access to data for
security reasons while simultaneously protecting individuals' privacy
by providing critical data to analysts via anonymized transaction
data and by exposing identity only if evidence and appropriate
authorization was obtained for further investigation. Ironically,
Genisys was the one technology that definitely had its funding
terminated and was not continued by another government agency after
the public outcry over TIA.
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:16 CST