Privacy Advocates Balk at Data Mining Project

By Catherine Hubbard, M.A., CCH Washington News Bureau.

TIA is a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to mine information and detect suspicious activity. EPIC, along with dozens of other groups, said in a letter to Senate leaders that TIA “will collect and mine vast amounts of information on the American public, including telephone records, bank records, medical records, and educational and travel data.” It added that “there are no systems of oversight or accountability contemplated in the TIA project.”

UNCONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM

In the letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., the groups asked the Senators to “act immediately to stop the development of this unconstitutional system of public surveillance.” The Nov. 18, 2002, letter is available on the EPIC website at www.epic.org.

Hoofnagle said DARPA is “surveiling 99 percent of the public in order to capture a miniscule population of people who are willing to commit violence to advance their political agenda.” He told CCH during a December 3 interview that it is “probably impossible to isolate individuals with evil intent when there are so many transactions that appear to be hostile.”

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the “idea of having a huge database on everything every American citizen buys, who they talk to on the Internet, what their financial records are, what their health records are [is] a very worrisome notion.” The administration has “put in no safeguards” against leaking information, he added. If there is a need for the database, it could “be done in a careful and measured way,” he said on “ABC This Week.”

FEASIBILITY

In response to the letter, Department Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge said it is “absurd to think that DARPA is somehow trying to become another police agency.” DARPA’s purpose “is to demonstrate the feasibility of this technology. If it proves useful, TIA would then be turned over to the intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement communities as a tool to help them in their battle against domestic terrorism,” he said. More information on the project is available on the Total Information Awareness website at www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm.

Jan Walker, a spokesperson for DARPA, said the department is taking privacy and security concerns seriously as it develops the technology. However, under the five-year program that began in October 2002, the department is using a synthetic database to test technology, according to Walker. She noted that the project does not involve actual data. Under the TIA program, the department hopes to “connect the dots” on suspicious transactions, she asserted. Terrorists do everything they can to blend in, stated Walker, yet they need to do some things to plan an attack, such as obtain special training, IDs and certain items. “Those are all transactions,” she stated, adding “We can develop technology to allow us to find the very few, but very important events and link them together.”