Special to TLE
A new military office, theTIAO, is currently working towards eliminating personal privacy in our lifetimes.
Many have focused on the forboding logo of the TIAO, which features an eye on top of a pyramid watching the world, and whether John Poindexter, famous for lying to Congress during the Iran/Contra investigations and conducting secret operations, should be in charge of this new operation. I am more concerned with the stated objectives of this operation than with who runs it or what pictures they use to identify themselves.
The programs this office is currently undertaking include:
Bio-surveillance - they are developing systems to spy on the internal operations of your body, most likely through already existing technology which can be implanted under the skin coupled with a massive computer network to process the information. NASA previously revealed their intention to develop technology to "read" brainwaves. It is still unclear whether NASA's program will be consumed by the TIAO or whether many governmental agencies will independently seek to be the leader in bio-spying.
Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) - they are developing automated biometric identification technologies to detect, recognize and identify humans at great distances using various biometric signatures
Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (WAE) - they are constructing numerous informational and behavioral models which will help predict future terrorists "based upon their behavior in the broader context of their political, cultural and ideological environment."
Of course, those in charge of this endeavor to deconstruct all human activity to a set of digitally encoded zeros and ones are offering idle promises that "privacy concerns" will be considered as they move forward.
As if the program weren't Orwellian enough, they had to introduce doublethink.
The English translation of the Latin inscription on the TIAO logo is "Knowledge is Power." The title of the office is Total Information Awareness. They are going to collect, analyze, and catalog any seemingly insignificant bit of data on you they can find because it may, when considered with various other seemingly innocent pieces of data, finger you as a potential terrorist. The goal of the program is to achieve total awareness of everything everyone does, says, or thinks.
Total knowledge is total power is total control.
Privacy is defined as the freedom from the intrusion of others in one's life or affairs. How can the military protect individual privacy while they work to eliminate it?
Answer: they can't, they won't, and they don't intend to. But, pro- government extremists have been successful thus far at curtailing liberty merely by offering empty assurances, full of amorphous terms and phrases, that they intend to protect what they just promised to destroy. With a game plan that allowed a secret court to authorize secret searches, why change now. You can't argue with success. Or as W. would say "Dance with the one what brung ya".
Imagine the sickness that must pervade the psyche of a group of people that seek total control over all of humanity and then brazenly announce their intentions, though somewhat cryptically, and create a symbol for their organization which could only be designed to threaten and terrify a controlled populous and deter resistance to its formation by a population which as of yet is not completely enslaved.
If the TIAO is successful there will, by definition, be a military takeover of matters previously reserved to civilian governments and a total end to privacy.
MSNBC
Nov. 18, 2002 � It�s a world where every movie you rent, every C.D. you buy and every site you check out over the Internet is tracked by the Federal government. George Orwell�s vision of the future? How about John Poindexter�s reality? John Poindexter, Ronald Reagan�s national security advisor, who was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-contra scandal, is putting together a system that would keep tabs on all of us and reveal potential terrorists. The question is, is the total information awareness office a valuable tool in the war on terror or is it a reckless and dangerous threat to our privacy? Michael Scardaville, a political analyst for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation and Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, debated on Hardball with Chris Matthews.
�THE TECHNOLOGY is about a system of domestic surveillance,� says Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. �In other words, you collect as much data as you can on Americans, educational records, credit reports, travel records. You put all of this in a database and you analyze it and you hope that you can uncover patterns of terrorist activity.�
Even the website for the Information Awareness office looks creepy. There is the all-seeing eye on top of the pyramid, the Latin scientia est potentia, which means �knowledge is power� and descriptions of anomalous pattern detection, biometric signatures and biologically inspired algorithms for agent control.
The �New York Times� calls it a snooper�s dream. The �Washington Post� says this is not neutral technology. The potential for abuse is enormous. Last week, the White House claimed the news media was getting part of it wrong.
�I�ve seen some reports, but that is not in the homeland security department legislation,� says Scott McClellan, deputy White House press secretary.
That is true, but only because it is already in the Pentagon budget at $10 million a year.
JUST COMPILING INFORMATION?
Some defenders acknowledge that John Poindexter himself is a P.R. nightmare, but they point out his system would piece together information already contained in more than 2,000 different law enforcement databases, things like financial records, educational background and travel history.
�If we admit that the information is all stuff already legitimately in the hands of the government, it seems to me to make very little sense to say, but we want the government to be really inefficient,� says Paul Rosenzweig, of the Heritage Foundation.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC
Rotenberg says that the government does not have all the personal information this new agency would have: �There are privacy laws,� he says. �There are banks and telephone companies and Internet service providers that are genuinely concerned about the privacy of their customers, so when John Poindexter comes along and says �We want to get all that customer data. We want to get that client data, patient information,� both individuals and businesses say �Hold on just a moment.�� Rotenberg argues that this type of information might only become accessible to law enforcement if they were doing criminal investigations. �That we understand,� he says. But this is opening the door to a type of government data collection that we�ve never allowed before.�
He also points out that some of the problems with tracking terrorists can be solved without instituting a national database of everyone�s private information. �This is not about facilitating the information flow among the intelligence agencies and the law enforcement community,� Rotenberg clarifies. The INS, he explains has a statutory obligation to pursue people who are here in the United States on visas to see what they�re doing. �But no one is arguing that point. What we�re talking about is whether you create a technology of widespread surveillance and that�s what this [agency] is proposing to do.�
ULTIMATELY FOR OUR SAFETY?
Michael Scardaville, argues that this tool will only be for the intelligence community and would ultimately be for everyone�s safety. �It should be limited only to the department of homeland security�s intelligence element, the FBI, and probably the CIA. It allows them to come in, say �OK, we know Mohammad Atta�s a terrorist. He�s in the United States. He might be up to something. Who else could he be working with?� They could then go and check credit card information say �Hey, he bought airline tickets for these couple of other guys.��
Scardaville argues that this agency would allow to make linkages between people and their activities. �The first thing they put in when doing a query into this system, is information they�ve already collected, intelligence information on a terrorist. It�s not a matter of taking in a vast bunch of information.�
In the wrong hands, Scardaville admits, information can be less than safe. �However, you can have abuse in any sort of system. A Federal government employee can misuse information that they have on you right now.�
Rotenberg fears that it might not be as simple as that. �We need checks and balances,� he says. �There seems to be no authority, there is no independent group to check on what is collected about us.�
MSNBC Correspondent David Schuster contributed to this report.
U.S. Develops Urban Surveillance System
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city.
Dubbed "Combat Zones That See," the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas.
Police, scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans.
According to interviews and contracting documents, the software may also provide instant alerts after detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watchlist, or search months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near terrorist activities.
The project is being overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is helping the Pentagon develop new technologies for combatting terrorism and fighting wars in the 21st century.
Its other projects include developing software that scans databases of everyday transactions and personal records worldwide to predict terrorist attacks and creating a computerized diary that would record and analyze everything a person says, sees, hears, reads or touches.
Scientists and privacy experts � who already have seen the use of face-recognition technologies at a Super Bowl and monitoring cameras in London � are concerned about the potential impact of the emerging DARPA technologies if they are applied to civilians by commercial or government agencies outside the Pentagon.
"Government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time," said John Pike, a Global Security.org defense analyst.
DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker dismisses those concerns. She said the Combat Zones That See (CTS) technology isn't intended for homeland security or law enforcement and couldn't be used for "other applications without extensive modifications."
"Once DARPA demonstrates that it can be done, a number of companies would likely develop their own version in hope of getting contracts from local police, nuclear plant security, shopping centers, even people looking for deadbeat dads." James Fyfe, a deputy New York police commissioner, believes police will be ready customers for such technologies.
"Police executives are saying, `Shouldn't we just buy new technology if there's a chance it might help us?'" Fyfe said. "That's the post-9-11 mentality." Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said he sees law enforcement applications for DARPA's urban camera project "in limited scenarios." But citywide surveillance would tax police manpower, Kerlikowske said. "Who's going to validate and corroborate all those alerts?"
According to contracting documents reviewed by The Associated Press, DARPA plans to award a three-year contract for up to $12 million by Sept. 1. In the first phase, at least 30 cameras would help protect troops at a fixed site. The project would use small $400 stick-on cameras, each linked to a $1,000 personal computer.
In the second phase, at least 100 cameras would be installed in 12 hours to support "military operations in an urban terrain." The second-phase software should be able to analyze the video footage and identify "what is normal (behavior), what is not" and discover "links between places, subjects and times of activity," the contracting documents state.
The program "aspires to build the world's first multi-camera surveillance system that uses automatic ... analysis of live video" to study vehicle movement "and significant events across an extremely large area," the documents state.
Both configurations will be tested at Ft. Belvoir, Va., south of Washington, then in a foreign city. Walker declined comment on whether Kabul, Afghanistan, or Baghdad, Iraq, might be chosen but says the foreign country's permission will be obtained.
DARPA outlined project goals March 27 for more than 100 executives of potential contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.
DARPA told the contractors that 40 million cameras already are in use around the world, with 300 million expected by 2005.
U.S. police use cameras to monitor bridges, tunnels, airports and border crossings and regularly access security cameras in banks, stores and garages for investigative leads. In the District of Columbia, police have 16 closed-circuit television cameras watching major roads and gathering places.
Great Britain has an estimated 2.5 million closed-circuit television cameras, more than half operated by government agencies, and the average Londoner is thought to be photographed 300 times a day.
But many of these cameras record over their videotape regularly. Officers have to monitor the closed-circuit TV and struggle with boredom and loss of attention. By automating the monitoring and analysis, DARPA "is attempting to create technology that does not exist today," Walker explained.
Though insisting CTS isn't intended for homeland security, DARPA outlined a hypothetical scenario for contractors in March that showed the system could aid police as well as the military. DARPA described a hypothetical terrorist shooting at a bus stop and a hypothetical bombing at a disco one month apart in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, a city with slightly more residents than Miami.
CTS should be able to track the day's movements for every vehicle that passed each scene in the hour before the attack, DARPA said. Even if there were 2,000 such vehicles and none showed up twice, the software should automatically compare their routes and find vehicles with common starting and stopping points.
Joseph Onek of the Open Society Institute, a human rights group, said current law that permits the use of cameras in public areas may have to be revised to address the privacy implications of these new technologies.
"It's one thing to say that if someone is in the street he knows that at any single moment someone can see him," Onek said. "It's another thing to record a whole life so you can see anywhere someone has been in public for 10 years."
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