FC: Mordechai Ben-Menachem on Pentagon's TIA: "Lies and obfuscation"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

I think the Aldridge statement that Mordechai is talking about is from 
Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Pete 
Aldridge last month at a Pentagon briefing:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-04186.html

News article:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/11/20/terror.tracking/index.html

---

From: "Mordechai" <quality () computer org>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 11:53:28 +0200
Subject: TIA feasability and costs
Reply-to: quality () computer org

Declan,

My name is Mordechai Ben-Menachem.  I am a lecturer at Ben-Gurion 
University, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
My areas of speciality are software engineering and project 
management.  Bob Bauman asked me to
write to you to express certain views concerning the DARPA project called 
TIA.

I have read the Aldrige testimony.  Most of the following was written in 
reaction to that.

Much of what Aldrige says walks a very narrow line between outright lies 
and obfuscation.  It is simply
not correct.  The areas for objection are too broad to cover here, but I 
shall try to give a few examples.

1.	You cannot talk about "... if they choose to use it."  The system ONLY 
has value if there is a
critical mass of data in it.  This means, by definition, that the database 
must be massively populated
and this must be constantly maintained.  This is not a situation where one 
can query and THEN the
system will go off to a thousand different databases around the world to 
search for transactions you
may want.  There is a fine line here between data collection and data 
retrieval.  The "if they choose"
part can relate to data retrieval, but that makes it a very sticky 
wicket.  Existing legal controls (e.g.,
search warrants, Miranda) are designed to control data collection, not use 
of that data once it has been
collected.

2.      Speech recognition /  rapid translation:
The statements are very misleading.  No such software exits today.  The 
state-of-the-art of voice
recognition / voice response systems is that of a watch (you can also tell 
your phone to dial your wife,
but only after rigorous training of the system).  The accuracy of 
translation systems used today is
mostly used as Computer Science jokes.  The distance to workable systems is 
quite profound.  Intel
has recently announced a 3 Giga Hertz chip.  This infers (via Moore's Law) 
that we shall see a 6 Giga
Hertz chip in 18 months.  Many authorities have called 6 GH a milestone 
that will allow a new set of
applications.  In other words, when those capabilities exist, we may be 
able to intelligently discuss
rapid, real-time translation.  However, by definition, we do not know how 
to conceive of those
applications now.  Perhaps it can be on a supercomputer, as cost is not the 
governing factor -- no, the
basic computational complexity may be solvable on a supercomputer (no proof 
of that exists) but there
are many other aspects that requires a different type of architecture for 
real time usage.  He also stated
that there will be voice recognition capabilities to recognise who is 
speaking.  Totally science fiction,
has never been tried in real life.  What exists is the ability to match 
"voice prints" via pattern
recognition techniques.  Very time consuming and with a very low level of 
accuracy and reliability.  I do
not recall it being recognized by any court, for example.

3.      Connections between transactions:
Echelon gathers data from some 8-billion telephone conversations 
today.  How successful has this
been in the "war on drugs"?  The answer is, almost not at all.  Add to 
that, all airline transactions,
chemical purchases, credit card ... How many daily transactions are we 
talking about -- 20 billion,
more?  (Visa alone has some 110 million transactions per day.)  There is no 
way to even imagine how
to query this size of database, much less, make any sense of the 
answer.  In other words, if they
manage to simulate the data (we do not know how to simulate that), and if 
they manage to perform a
query, what do we do with the results of such a query?  The data 
visualization techniques do not exist.
The quantity of false positives will overload any investigative agency 
(tens of thousands per day).  As a
matter of fact, the database technology that would allow this type of query 
does not exist, either.  I must
add, on small scales, tens of thousands of transactions, this is being 
performed.  The distance to be
able to process five orders of magnitude more is perhaps a decade.

4.      Collaborative reasoning:
This part is probably practical, though the development is still quite a 
way off. I have done a little bit of
work in this area. (I have an article submitted to a major journal that I 
can send you, but it has not yet
been published.)  The major issue here is reliability.  We are talking 
about using massive webs of
hierarchical data (that is, the data has both hierarchical attributes and 
network attributes).  With this
level of complexity, testing such a system is very far beyond our 
capabilities -- we simply have no idea
how to ensure that the answers we are given are correct because we do not 
know how to test it.  This is
not the only difficulty.  The definition of interrelationships is an open 
issue -- they are not static.

As I said, space and time do not permit me to do a full analysis and I have 
not read the full
specification.  The bottom line is composed of two points.  The report by 
Pete Aldridge cannot simply
be taken at face value.  The system / project, as presently defined reminds 
me greatly of Reagan's SDI
project.  Brilliantly thought of, but much too early.  Some of the fruits 
of that effort are just now coming
on line, 20 years later (e.g., the Arrow anti-ballistic missile and the 
Nautilus anti-tactical rocket laser
gun).  When SDI was conceived, it was not technologically possible.  This 
is not today.  In 20 years,
who knows, this may be reasonable.  Today, the base technologies do not 
exist.  The complexity is too
great, the size is impossible to conceive.  I don't care how passionate 
Poindexter is.  It sounds wrong.

Additionally, I spoke with a colleague of mine whose expertise is in the 
area of face recognition and
other "bio" technologies.  My objective was to double-check that my initial 
guess-timates were
reasonable.  He confirms and even thought me rather optimistic on some of 
the things.  For instance,
"rapid translation" based on speech recognition: I said I thought it a few 
years off.  He says it is AT
LEAST 7-10 years off.  The capabilities we see today are very primitive.

In any case, we are talking about a 10-20 year timeframe to demonstrate 
capabilities -- similar to SDI.
You are talking about spending billions of dollars for a project to develop 
a system that has no hope of
being useful in a significant time-frame -- the size of the project is much 
larger than what has been
reported, the base technologies do not exist.

best regards, I hope this is helpful and I shall be most pleased to further 
explain if you like,
  Mordechai Ben-Menachem
        Dept. of Industrial Engineering & Management
        Ben-Gurion University
        P. O. Box 5613; Beer-Sheva; 84156; Israel
        Tel. 972-86-433231, mob. 972-57-433231, off. 972-86-479374
	quality () computer org 




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