Overview and History
In
January of 2002, former national security advisor John Poindexter was appointed
as the director of the new Information Awareness Office. This office was a part
of the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (TIA Resource
Center). The office’s
main functions had been to research and develop the Terrorism Information
Awareness Program.
The original
mission reveals the ambition of the program:
[I]magine,
develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies,
components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter
asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness. (Information Awareness Office)
The Program would
have allowed the Department of Defense to gather the personal information of
American citizens that is available in computer records from a variety of
sources and analyze this data in pursuit of terrorist activities. Research and
development of several new systems has been undertaken including voice
recognition, advanced databases, biometric identification at a distance, and
systems to analyze not only individual human behavior but also the movement of
political, social, and economic entities (Information Awareness Office).
As
Congress became aware of the program in August of 2002, legislators from both
parties began to work on bills that would limit the program or stop it
entirely. In February of 2003, Congress passed legislation that stopped the
program pending a report detailing its activity (Information Awareness Office).
A report by the Departments of Defense, Justice and the Central Intelligence
Agency was given to Congress in May of 2003 counters privacy concerns:
[R]esearch and testing activities are only
using data and information that is either (a) foreign intelligence and counter
intelligence information legally obtained and usable by the Federal Government
under existing law, or (b) wholly synthetic (artificial) data that has been
generated, for research purposes only, to resemble and model real-world
patterns of behavior. (Report to Congress)
The name of the
program was also changed at this time from Total Information Awareness to
Terrorism Information Awareness.
Congress remained under public
pressure and in September of 2003, they
cut funding to the program under the Department of Defense Appropriations Act,
2004 (Congressional Record). The Information Awarness
Office was effectively closed. Yet, the act allows the Department of Defense to
continue some of the reasearch activities but implies
that intelligence would not be gathered on American citizens (Congressional
Record). Congress appropriated funds to the National Foreign Intelligence
Program to continue much of the work (Sniffen). Much
of the reasearch and development into the specific
systems of the program continues in other agencys and
departments (Total/ Terrorism). One office, the Advanced Research and
Development Activity, founded by Central Inteligence
Agency director George Tenet in 1998, has taken over some of the
work of the former program (Sniffen). This office is headquarted
in The National Security Agency and does work for many other agencies including
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Sniffen). Other programs
also exist that perform similar data mining activities including the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange Program or
MATRIX (Total/ Terrorism). This program, run by the Department of Justice, currently
allows nine states to contract with a private company, Seisint
Inc., of Florida
(Multistate Anti-Terrorism). This company collects
various public and private records on individuals and privides
them to law enforcment agencies in the contracted
states (Multistate Anti-Terrorism). Another program worth looking at is the Defence Reasearch Projects
Agency’s Lifelog program (Webb). The Terrorism
Information Awareness Program may no longer exist yet many other programs are
engaged in similar data mining activities.
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