Pentagon Surveillance Plan Is Described as Less Invasive

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

New York Times
Pentagon Surveillance Plan Is Described as Less Invasive
By ADAM CLYMER
May 7, 2003

WASHINGTON, May 6  A top Pentagon research official told Congress today that
a program intended to forestall terrorism by tapping computer databases  but
curbed by legislation this winter because of privacy fears  would not look
into Americans' financial or health records.

Instead, the official said the program, the Total Information Awareness
program, would rely mostly on information already held by the government,
especially by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

[ like the airport screening data base; like banking information gotten for
other purposes; like IRS etc etc etc? Djf]

The Pentagon official, Dr. Tony Tether, director of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, also known as Darpa, told a House Government
Reform subcommittee that "we are not developing a system to profile the
American public."

Dr. Tether offered a vision of the program that sounded much less
threatening than the description given last year by John M. Poindexter, the
retired admiral who is in charge of the project.

Mr. Poindexter told a California audience then that "we must become much
more efficient and more clever in the way we find new sources of data, mine
information from the new and old, make it available for analysis, convert it
to knowledge and create actionable options." He described a system that
could tap into Internet mail, culling records, credit card and banking
transactions and travel documents.

Dr. Tether said he hoped that the agency's impending report on the project,
due on May 20, would calm public and Congressional fears.

In February, legislation prohibiting deployment of the system said that
research could not continue after May 20 unless the agency provided Congress
a detailed description of the project, from its spending plans to its impact
on privacy and civil liberties to its likelihood of trapping terrorists.

Today, under friendly questioning by Representative Adam H. Putnam, a
Florida Republican who is the subcommittee's chairman, Dr. Tether said the
main area of private data that might be useful in anticipating terrorist
attacks would be transportation records, since terrorists had to travel.

Saying "I'm trying to help you guys a little with your p.r. problem," Mr.
Putnam invited Dr. Tether to swear that the agency was not "contemplating"
using credit card, library or video-rental information. Dr. Tether said he
could see no value in any such data, but he could not swear that no
consultant hired by the agency was not "contemplating" the value.

Dr. Tether said the system was intended to devise "attack scenarios" based
on past terrorist attacks or intelligence about plans.

He offered two examples. If the concern was a truck bomb, he said, one
question to be posed was, "Are there foreign visitors to the United States
who are staying in urban areas, buying large amounts of fertilizer and
renting trucks?"

Or, he said, if the system had been in place, it could have considered the
threat posed by a 1995 report from the Philippines that terrorists were
considering using airplanes as bombs to destroy landmarks like the World
Trade Center.

Hypothesizing about how that would be accomplished, he said, a review of
that report would suggest that terrorists would have to learn how to fly
large planes, without focusing on how to land them. That issue might have
triggered more attention to F.B.I. concerns in Phoenix in 2001 about
foreigners taking flying lessons, he said.

Dr. Tether argued that from the outset of the Total Information Awareness
project, Darpa had been aware of the need to protect privacy. One essential
element was concern by different agencies that sources of their information
be kept secret. "Historically," he said "agencies have been reluctant to
share intelligence data for fear of exposing their sources and methods."

But he also said his agency intended the tools it developed "to be only used
in a manner that complies with the Privacy Act."

Dr. Teher said that, "We knew that the American public and their elected
officials must have confidence that their liberties will not be violated
before they would accept this kind of technology."
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