[Infowarrior] - DHS Data Mining Program Suspended After Evading Privacy Review

[Richard Forno]

DHS Data Mining Program Suspended After Evading Privacy Review, Audit Finds
By Ryan Singel EmailAugust 20, 2007 | 6:01:49 PM

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/dhs-data-mining.html

A controversial Homeland Security data mining system called ADVISE that
dreamed of searching through trillions of records culled from government,
public and private databases analyzed personal information without the
required privacy oversight, may cost more than commercially available
alternatives and has been suspended until a privacy review has been
completed, according to an internal audit.

The Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic
Enhancement program, one of twelve DHS data mining efforts, hit the trifecta
of civil libertarians concerns about data mining programs ­ invasiveness,
secrecy and ineffectiveness, according to a recent DHS Inspector General
report (.pdf).

DHS hoped the data sifting tool would help analysts "detect, deter, and
mitigate threats to our homeland and disseminate timely information to its
homeland security partners and the American public." The idea was to build a
generic toolset that could find hidden relationships in massive amounts of
data and provide the tool to groups working with data sets as divergent as
intelligence and newspaper reports to WMD sensor data.

Started in 2003, the program has gotten $42 million in funding through 2007.

But the data-mining program faces a troubled future, due to revelations that
its tests did not simply use fake data as the DHS Science and Technology
section publicly said they did.

"The pilots used live data, including personally identifiable information,
from multiple sources in attempts to identify potential terrorist activity,"
the report said.

    For its part, the DHS Privacy Office did not know that S&T had proceeded
with implementation of the ADVISE pilot programs with live data, but without
addressing privacy matters. In a July 6, 2006, report to the Congress, the
Privacy Office stated that the ADVISE tool alone does not perform data
mining. [Š] Unbeknownst to the Privacy Office, the ADVISE pilots had been
implemented at least 18 months prior to its July 2006 report.

ADVISE is now shut down until after privacy reviews are completed.

The Science and Technology Directorate hoped its system would tap into 50
DHS databases and 100 other data sources. A DHS Workshop paper said the
system would be engineered to handle 1 billion structured pieces of data and
one million unstructured text messages per hour. The Inspector General found
however that access to data was never lined up and that commercially
available products like i2's Analyst Notebook were cheaper and more
effective for small data sets.

    For example, officials of Customs and Border Protection¹s Office of
Strategic Trade initially expressed interest in ADVISE as a potential
solution to their requirement to view and process millions of pieces of
trade data. Customs and Border Protection officials received a demonstration
of ADVISE capabilities and attended a training session at Livermore.
However, after learning the cost of ADVISE, these officials told S&T that
the system was too expensive and therefore would not be a good option for
them.

The Total Information Awareness program, a similar research effort started
by the Darpa, the Pentagon's high-tech research arm, was largely shuttered
by Congress in 2003.

But the dream of database diving to identify would-be terrorists using
super-smart algorithms lives on.