Global Surveillance: The Government's Plan

Computerworld - The U.S. Department of Defense has established a research group to develop technology for information gathering and analysis on a huge scale. Its goal is to mine data sources all over the world -- including government and commercial stores of personal information -- to look for terrorists and terrorist threats.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) new Information Awareness Office (IAO) is headed by Reagan administration national security adviser John Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 in the Iran-Contra affair. The conviction was overturned on appeal.
The IAO aims to foster the development of information systems to "counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption, national security warning and national security decision-making," DARPA says on its Web site.
The threat "is characterized by collections of people loosely organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to identify and define," DARPA says. "IAO plans to develop technology that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks, their plans and potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats."
DARPA says it plans to develop prototype systems with the following kinds of capabilities:

• Collaboration and sharing of information over TCP/IP networks across agency boundaries.


• Large, distributed repositories with dynamic schemas that can be changed interactively by users.


• Foreign-language machine translation and speech recognition.


• Recognition of biometric signatures of humans.


• Real-time learning, pattern matching and anomalous pattern detection.


• Entity extraction from natural-language text.


• Human network analysis and behavior modeling.


• Event prediction and capability development modeling.


• Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning.


• Storytelling, change detection and truth maintenance.


• Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control.

The IAO is organized around 13 programs. The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, which Poindexter oversees, is to "revolutionize the ability of the U.S. to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, decipher their plans and take timely action to preempt and defeat terrorist acts."
The TIA program aims to create a counterterrorism information system that, among other things, "provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed."
A second IAO program, called Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD), aims to develop technology for "automated discovery, extraction and linking of sparse evidence contained in large amounts of classified and unclassified data sources. EELD is developing detection capabilities to extract relevant data and relationships about people, organizations and activities from message traffic and open-source data."
The program has already demonstrated the feasibility of extracting relationships from text. In the coming year, DARPA says it plans to expand that capability to include Web pages, financial transactions, communications, travel records andthe like.