Government Equivocates on TIA

Defense Department Issues Mandated Report

The Bush Administration has released a congressionally mandated report on anti-terrorism data-mining research. The report (www.darpa.mil/body/tia/tia_report_page.htm) responds to privacy and civil-liberties concerns raised by the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The Defense Department at the same time changed the program's name from Total Information Awareness, stressing the objective is to "protect U.S. citizens by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats before an attack" and to counter the impression that TIA was "to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens."

The report states, "The TIA research and development program aims to integrate information technologies into a prototype to provide tools to better detect, classify, and identify potential foreign terrorists" in order to "preempt adverse actions." It answers privacy and civil-liberties concerns by affirming that data used will be either (a) foreign intelligence and counterintelligence 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." The report describes rules-based privacy protections and misuse detection being developed, given that "research may indicate" the need to access "databases that also contain information about U.S. persons," clarifying that the restrictions on sources apply only to current research and development activities.

The report further explains that "the TIA program is not attempting to create or access a centralized database that will store information gathered from various publicly or privately held databases." It describes instead "a federated database architecture and algorithms" with development targeting data integration issues.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's reaction was, "The report doesn't shed much light on the issues ... with a few not-very-reassuring clues to the government's thinking about privacy and civil liberties. ... There's little concern for data accuracy, and there's no mention of TIA's accountability to individuals. Also conspicuously absent is any concrete discussion of privacy or civil liberties issues in the actual use of TIA."

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center similarly responded that the proposed methods don't "reflect the full range of privacy interests — the need for transparency, procedural fairness, and remedies [for incorrect data] — the need to understand the collection and use of information."

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), author of the congressional amendment that required the report, likewise stated that it "leaves too many unanswered questions, particularly how civil liberties and privacy would be protected." Sen. Wyden noted, however, "Congress would still have to approve any deployment of the technology."

— Seth Grimes

Contributing editor Seth Grimes [grimes@altaplana.com] consults on management and analysis of governmental statistics.

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