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What Matters: January 2003

WHAT MATTERS: JANUARY 2003

Big Brother Is No Longer Fiction: On the

Internet, Everyone Knows You're a Poindexter
Total Information Awareness (TIA)-a new government R&D program-
evokes the specter of a total surveillance state while it purports to
defend America against the threat of terrorism. Before I present
"information awareness" about how the government is harnessing
technology for TIA, let's review the context of recent efforts to fight
terrorism and increase the security of U.S. citizens.

Energized by the horrific events of September 11th, the federal

government has-rapidly, and with very little debate-enacted draconian
measures to enforce a "security" state. Ostensibly designed to crack
down on terrorists, these new measures are in fact terrorizing many
U.S. residents, rolling back decades of hard-won civil rights protections,
and threatening the very basis of our democratic system, the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

These measures include: The USA PATRIOT Act (the acronym stands for
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) and the Homeland
Security Act, arrests and detentions without charges, secret military
tribunals, nullification of judicial safeguards, and unwarranted domestic
spying on private citizens and their communications, purchases, even
library habits. Technologies under development by the TIA program will
create an information security apparatus worthy of George Orwell's
1984or the cynical-paranoid worldview of Robert Anton Wilson and
Robert Shea's The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

If the technologies themselves aren't creepy enough, you might

shudder when you see the early logo (above) of the Information
Awareness Office (IAO). Recently removed from their website, the
chilling graphic featured a Masonic pyramid-recognizable from the back
of the U. S. Dollar bill-except in this version the pyramid's all-seeing
eye scans the globe with a surreal light beam worthy of science fiction.
Perhaps even more disturbing, the office is headed by former Admiral
John Poindexter. You might remember him from Iran-Contra, the
Reagan administration's secret scheme to support Nicaraguan terrorists
with proceeds from illegal arms sales to Iran. As William Safire
reminded us in The New York Times:

"A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of

misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court
overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for
his testimony."

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I work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation ( EFF) where we review

and respond to legislation and policymaking that affects our digital
rights. We struggle to keep up with a deluge of new proposals and
legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act (USAPA). The Act was
approved within five weeks with practically no floor debate by a nearly
unanimous Congress. Signed into law on October 26, 2001, USAPA
gave sweeping new powers to both domestic law enforcement and
international intelligence agencies and eliminated the checks and
balances previously afforded courts to curb abuses. USAPA gave us
expanded surveillance with reduced judicial oversight, overreaching
police powers with a lack of focus on terrorism, including a mechanism
permitting U.S. foreign intelligence agents to spy on U.S. citizens.

In June 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft revamped FBI

regulations to permit domestic surveillance-including online
surveillance-of political, social, or ethnic groups without a subpoena or
a court order, even in cases where there is no reasonable suspicion of
criminal activity. Ashcroft unleashed the FBI from earlier procedural
reforms which were instituted in the '70s following revelation of
widespread abuses like the COINTELPRO program. (COINTELPRO was a
program under which FBI agents attended political protests, kept
dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. citizens, including the Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. A throwback to the excesses of McCarthyism,
CONTELPRO actively disrupted the lives and careers of those who J.
Edgar Hoover and his allies considered disloyal to America.)

The Homeland Security Act (HSA), signed into law on November 25,
2002, authorized the creation of a massive new Department of
Homeland Security to coordinate the efforts of twenty-two government
agencies.

USAPA established an exception to privacy laws permitting Internet

Service Providers (ISPs) to disclose email or other electronic
communications to specific law-enforcement agencies without a
subpoena or a court order. Under USAPA, an ISP had to have a
reasonable belief that an emergency exists where there is immediate
danger of death or serious physical injury. The Homeland Security Act
downgrades "reasonable belief" to a "good faith" requirement and
replaces the death-or-serious-injury requirement with an ill-defined
"immediate threat to a national-security interest." The HSA leaves it to
commercial businesses (ISPs)-not supposedly accountable public
personnel-to decide for themselves what constitutes a national-security
interest. It also broadens the disclosure exception to all government
agencies, including school principals and potentially even dog catchers,
rather than those involved specifically in law enforcement.

Just after September 11, 2001, thousands of people of Middle Eastern

heritage-and many who simply "looked" to be Middle Eastern, Arab or
Moslem-were held in indefinite detention without attorneys or even
charges brought against them. Some were transported to the
Guatanamo U.S. Naval base on Cuba, questioned, investigated,
subjected to questionable conditions contrary to the Geneva
Convention, and perhaps tried in secret military tribunals. Again in
December 2002 and January 2003, the INS rounded up hundreds of

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men and boys of Middle Eastern descent after requiring all citizens of
certain Arab countries in the U.S. to register with the INS. These mass
arrests have not yet approached the magnitude of the internment of
Japanese, Japanese-Americans, and many who simply looked Japanese,
in U.S. camps during World War II, but these are worrisome signs
nonetheless.

The political and legal climate is extremely tense and the forces of
technology are brought to bear in attempts to find quick fixes to ease
that tension.

Air travelers find themselves on secret "no fly" and "maybe fly" lists
under the newly established Transportation Security Administration
(TSA) now the employer of airport security checkpoint personnel. The
new Computerized Assisted Passenger Screening (CAPPS II) passenger
profiling system is designed to identify and track travelers.

But the most interesting-and far-reaching-technologies come from the

Total Information Awareness research program sponsored by the
Information Awareness Office (IAO) at the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), the military agency which sponsored early
development of the Internet. DARPA has accepted the TIA project
proposed by Admiral Poindexter. With TIA, he'll seek to use information
technology for unprecedented surveillance on a massive scale.

In particular, TIA plans to use transactional data such as financial,

education, travel, medical, veterinary, transportation, and housing
information, along with biometric data, such as face, fingerprint, gait,
and iris recognition to "determine the feasibility of searching vast
quantities of data to determine links and patterns indicative of terrorist
activities," explained Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge.

TIA projects include technologies beyond even the wildest dreams of

Orwell's Big Brother:

Genisys -ultra-large, all-source terrorist information repositories

Genoa II -developing information technology needed by teams of
intelligence analysts in anticipating terrorist threats
Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery -linking sparse
evidence in large amounts of classified and unclassified data
sources
Wargaming the Assymetric Environment -predictive
technology in the context of terrorists' political, cultural, and
ideological environment
Wargaming the Assymetric Environment -predictive
technology in the context of terrorists' political, cultural, and
ideological environment
FutureMap -market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and
predicting future events
Bio-Surveillance -early detection of clandestine bio-warfare
attack
Human ID at a Distance -identify humans at border crossing,
DoD facilities, etc., from face, gait, and iris recognition
Effective, Affordable, Resusable Speech -to Text
(EARS)-automatic transcription technology for audio signals
Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and
Summarization -multilingual language processing
Babylon -rapid, two-way, natural language speech translation

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interfaces for combat environments

Communicator -enabling warfighters to talk with computers

On the face of it some of these technologies might sound fairly

non-threatening to the average American, but in the context of current
attacks of civil liberties, TIA technologies have frightening implications
and a large potential for abuse by agencies with a history of such
abuse.

One pundit illustrated the potential dangers of aggregating personally

identifiable information by researching and publishing the names, home
addresses, and home phone numbers of Poindexter and several of his
neighbors. He urged readers to contact Poindexter to let him know
what they think of Poindexter's plans for their personally identifiable
information. Perhaps that's why the CVs and biographies of TIA project
managers have disappeared from the IAO website, along with the
chilling graphic.

Whether or not DARPA keeps Poindexter on amidst the controversy

about his role in TIA is irrelevant. Total Information Awareness projects
will have a life of their own and they set the stage for creation of a Big
Brother-style information security apparatus that will irrevocably alter
our democracy.

Times are tough. The economy is weak and government spending may
be the only way to keep many corporations afloat or even prosperous.
Writer Bruce Sterling refers to the President's Critical Infrastructure
Protection Board "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" plan drafted
in September 2002 as the " Cybersecurity Industrial Complex."

Questions remain: How many of the laws passed by Congress and the
programs funded by the U.S. government will actually increase security
and decrease the threat of terrorism? How many are just traditional
pork-barrel payoffs to stimulate the economy and enrich the wealthy?
How many will senselessly abridge our civil liberties and our quality of
life in the process?

What we need are sensible strategies for increasing security while

ensuring privacy so that we protect Americans not only from terrorism
but also from unwarranted abrogation of our civil liberties.

Nota bene
As this column was going to press (January 15, 2003), a broad coalition
of advocacy groups from across the political spectrum announced its
opposition to TIA. In a letter to the House Armed Services Committee,
nine groups including EFF, the ACLU, and the American Conservative
Union said: "Congress should not allow the Defense Department to
develop unilaterally a surveillance tool that would invade the privacy of
innocent people inside the United States." At the same time, U. S.
Senator Russell Feingold has introduced legislation calling for a
moratorium on data mining, the Data-Mining Moratorium Act of 2003.
"The untested and controversial intelligence procedure known as
data-mining is capable of maintaining extensive files containing both
public and private records on each and every American," Feingold said.

Further updates (February 19, 2003)

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The government has proposed even wider expansion of surveillance

powers. As Decalan McCullagh reports on CNET: "Attorney General
John Ashcroft wants even more power to snoop on the Internet, spy on
private conversations and install secret microphones, spyware and
keystroke loggers."

Read the Center for Public Integrity's analysis of "PATRIOT 2" and EFF's
commentary on "Son of Patriot."

The New York Timesreports that Members of a House-Senate

Conference have adopted Senator Wyden's Amendment limiting the
Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. Funding will terminate for
the program unless DARPA submits a detailed report to Congress within
90 days. Additionally, TIA cannot be deployed against US Citizens
without Congressional approval. For more information, see the EPIC
TIA Page.

For more information:

" Homeland Insecurity: Is Your Privacy in Danger? " San Francisco
Chronicle, December 12, 2002

" The Domestic Spying Renaissance " Security Focus, June 24, 2002

" Cities Say No to Federal Snooping " Wired News, December 19, 2002
(and on the same page in the right column) "Overview of Changes to
Your Legal Rights" Associated Press.

EFF analysis of TIA

EFF Action Alerts on TIA

About the Author

As founder and first Executive Director of the
Online Policy Group, Will Doherty '85 has
demonstrated a strong commitment to protecting
and expanding rights of access, privacy, and safety
on the Internet. Doherty has also worked since
January 2001 as the Media Relations Director of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation.

Prior to founding the Online Policy Group, he served as the Director of

Online Community Development at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation, where he focused on the online rights of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender communities. He managed GLAAD's Digital
Media Resource Center in San Francisco, cultivating strategic
partnerships in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Will Doherty has twenty years of experience as a computing consultant

and online activist. In the early 1980's, he worked on the ARPANET,
precursor to the Internet. He served as the Globalization Operations
Manager at Sybase, Inc., and as a Localization Program Manager and a
Technical Writer for Sun Microsystems, Inc. He has designed and
implemented Internet strategies and websites for dozens of nonprofit
community and advocacy organizations. In addition to a BS in
Computer Science and Writing from MIT, Will has an MBA from Golden

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Gate University.

What Matters is a guest opinion column written by a different MIT

alumnus or alumna. The views expressed are entirely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alumni
Association or MIT. Interested in writing a column? Email
whatmatters@mit.edu.

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