Uncommon Thought Journal: TIA Lives

January 27, 2006

TIA Lives

Does anyone remember TIA - Total Information Awareness? It was a big plan over in the DoD run under DARPA to collect all the information available on everyone in the United States into one massive database. Then a datamining program would be running continuously to catch, terrorists, thugs, and anyone else who "rang a bell." The funding for TIA was killed, and it seems like Congress went back to sleep. Meanwhile, it seems that virtually every agency in the government has gone about collecting massive amounts of information and "datamining it. Further, they cross-connect between their databases and "mine" that. That sounds an awful lot like what TIA was supposed to do.

President Bush authorized the warrantless wiretapping of certain telecommunications switching stations, and now has launched a "Campaign To Justify Spying." It is clear from the information that is coming to the surface, that the wiretapping was no anywhere as limited as the administration wants people to believe. The NSA utilizes a massive surveillance system called ECHELON, and other programs the public does not know about. ECHELON itself is a massive cyber vacuum cleaner. It is constructed to sweep up massive amounts of data - not selectively "eavesdrop" on specific individuals (Hager, 2/2/90 see also ECHELON: America's Secret Global Surveillance Network).

Now, the Department of Justice's attempt to subpoena the data of searches from all of the major search engines has hit the headlines. Google appears to be the only one refusing to provide the records demanded. The argument of the DoJ, and the justification of the search engine companies (Yahoo, MSN, and AOL) that have given, is that "private" data is not being released. The FBI says they simply want to look for search patterns in their efforts to track pornography.

However, I support Google. While identifying information is purportedly not included, the possibility of that data being matched up with other data - gathered say through the NSA's ECHELON program or other sources - seems highly likely. After all, if in one set of data you have time and origination of internet activity, and from the search engine data you have time and search information, it would not be that difficult to get a list of "suspects."

That is the problem with the massive collecting of data from a variety of sources. All you need is a limited amount of common information to generate a file on individuals. Of course, those individuals may be totally innocent of any suspicious activity. I know that certain areas of my research return "hits" that would fall under "pornography" - even though that is not what I was searching for.

The request for this type of data, gives lie to any protestations that the illegal NSA spying was "limited" to a few individuals. The constant push across the government agencies has been toward massive data collection - not targeted data collection. It is clear that the TIA program is being implemented in modules and that is happening rapidly. They have simply set it up as a distributed system rather than a centralized system. However, maybe that was the plan all along. You let the TIA program leak knowing it is going to cause outrage and be shut down. Meanwhile you start piece meal implementation across a variety of programs and agencies. No one will realize that you have the system essentially in place for quite a while. From the information that has come out, it is clear that massive data collection, datamining, and the linking across different agencies databases is definitely happening. It will be much more difficult to stop this insidious invasion than it was to stop the TIA program.

Related Articles
1/25/06 Hafner, NYT, After Subpoenas, Internet Searches Give Some Pause

1/24/06 Montalbano, ComputerWorld, Microsoft defends decision to give up search data

1/20/06 Menn & Gaither, LA Times, U.S. Obtains Internet Users' Search Records

1/16/06 Taylor, Hartford Courant, The Pacifist 'Threat'

12/12/04 Lichtblau, NYT, Homeland Security Department Experiments With New Tool to Track Financial Crime

12/08/04 Jehl, NYT, Debate on Secret Program Bursts Into Open

12/21/02 Wolf, Uncommon Thought Journal, Disappearing Privacy Rights

7/29/03 Wolf, Uncommon Thought Journal, DARPA's FutureMAP - trading in terrorism