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[infowar.de] Proteste gegen "Total Information Awareness Office" des Pentagon
Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
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Vgl. dazu die Beschwichtigungen von Rumsfeld:
Jim Garamone: Rumsfeld Says Don't Sweat DARPA Info Awareness Experiment
American Forces Press Service, 18.11.2002
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Nov2002/n11182002_200211181.html
RB
EPIC Alert
Volume 9.23
November 19, 2002
http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_9.23.html
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[1] Public Protest Over Pentagon Surveillance System Mounts
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The Pentagon's proposed "Total Information Awareness" (TIA)
surveillance system is coming under increasing attack. In an open
letter sent yesterday, a coalition of over 30 civil liberties groups
urged Senators Thomas Daschle (D-SD) and Trent Lott (R-MS) to "act
immediately to stop the development of this unconstitutional system of
public surveillance." Newspapers across the country have written
editorials castigating the program. The New York Times has said that
"Congress should shut down the program pending a thorough
investigation." The Washington Post wrote, "The defense secretary
should appoint an outside committee to oversee it before it proceeds."
William Safire's recent column, which played a major role in igniting
the public outcry, called the surveillance system "a supersnooper's
dream."
The TIA project is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA)'s Information Awareness Office, headed by John
Poindexter. The surveillance system purports to capture a person's
"information signature" so that the government can track potential
terrorists and criminals involved in "low-intensity/low-density"
forms of warfare and crime. The goal of the system is to track
individuals by collecting as much information about them as possible
and using computer algorithms and human analysis to detect potential
activity. The project calls for the development of "revolutionary
technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories," which
would contain information from multiple sources to create a "virtual,
centralized, grand database." This database would be populated by
transaction data contained in current databases, such as financial
records, medical records, communication records, and travel records,
as well as new sources of information. Intelligence data would also
be fed into the database.
A key component of the project is the development of data mining or
knowledge discovery tools that will sift through the massive amount
of information to find patterns and associations. The surveillance
plan will also improve the power of search tools such as Project
Genoa, which Poindexter's former employer Syntek Technologies
assisted in developing. The Defense Department aims to fund the
development of more such tools and data mining technology to help
analysts understand and even "preempt" future action. A further
crucial component is the development of biometric technology to
enable the identification and tracking of individuals. DARPA has
already funded its "Human ID at a Distance" program, which aims to
positively identify people from a distance through technologies such
as face recognition and gait recognition. A nationwide
identification system might also be of great assistance to such a
project by providing an easy means to track individuals across
multiple information sources.
The initial plan calls for a five year research project into these
various technologies. According to the announcement soliciting
industry proposals, the interim goal is to build "leave-behind
prototypes with a limited number of proof-of-concept demonstrations
in extremely high risk, high payoff areas." The FBI and the
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are also working on data
mining projects that will merge commercial databases, public
databases, and intelligence data. Documents obtained by EPIC through
the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that the developers of the
new passenger profiling system in the TSA held meetings with
Poindexter's team earlier this year. EPIC is currently involved in a
FOIA lawsuit to obtain documents from the Information Awareness
Office.
The coalition's letter to Senators Daschle and Lott is available at:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/tialetter11.18.02.html
EPIC's Total Information Awareness Page:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/
Information Awareness Office's Total Information Awareness project
description:
http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm
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