[Infowarrior] - Homeland Security revives supersnoop

[Richard Forno]

Homeland Security revives supersnoop
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published March 8, 2007


Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that
sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible
terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for
investigations.
    The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the
Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by
Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.
    A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project
called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and
Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin
Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
    The investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy laws,
and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq war
supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a panel aide
said.
    The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track
individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms
that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict
terrorist behavior.
    Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details,
medical records, travel and banking information.
    Privacy concerns prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to
introduce legislation in January to require that government agencies
disclose data-mining practices in regular reports to Congress.
    "A serious discussion on the implications of data-mining programs is
long overdue," Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and a sponsor of the
bill, said yesterday. Sen. John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, is also
a bill sponsor.
    "Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of secret
government programs analyzing their personal information. Congress needs to
know more about the operational aspects and privacy implications of
data-mining programs before these programs are allowed to go forward," Mr.
Feingold said.
    A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not return a
call for comment.
    Congress also tucked language inside Homeland Security's spending bill
in September requiring an investigation by the agency's inspector general,
but allowed $40 million in funding to go forward in this year's budget.
    "The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and
correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence
on terrorists," the spending bill said. "A prototype is currently available
to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data,
including some on U.S. citizens."
    According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in March
2003, TIA planned "to use data mining technologies to sift through personal
transactions in electronic data to find patterns and associations connected
to terrorist threats and activities."
    "Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project
provoked expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion of
privacy of law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the direction
of the project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra
affair," the CRS report said.
    "While the law enforcement and intelligence communities argue that more
sophisticated information gathering techniques are essential to combat
today's sophisticated terrorists, civil libertarians worry that the
government's increased capability to assemble information will result in
increased and unchecked government power, and the erosion of individual
privacy," the report said.
    ADVISE was initiated in 2003 following the demise of the TIA project.
    The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive quantities
of information from many different sources" to find "hidden relationships in
the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories and
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a Homeland Security workshop that
outlined this and other technology under development.
    The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million
"relationships" or connections per hour, says the report, which included an
example of how friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be
linked by pinging the data
    
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