Pentagon Aims to Sift Terror Data
Robert O’HARROW Jr., The Washington Post
A new Pentagon research office has started designing a global computer surveillance system to give U.S. counter-terrorism officials access to personal government and commercial databases around the world.
The Information Awareness Office, run by former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, aims to develop new technologies to sift through “ultra-large” data warehouses and networked computers in search of threatening patterns among everyday transactions, such as credit card purchases and travel reservations, according to interviews and documents.
Authorities already have access to a wealth of information about individual terrorists, but they typically have to obtain court approval in the United States or make laborious diplomatic and intelligence efforts overseas. The system proposed by Poindexter and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at about $ 200 million a year, would be able to sweep up and analyze data in a much more systematic way. It would provide a more detailed look at data than the super-secret National Security Agency now has, the former Navy admiral said.
“How are we going to find terrorists and pre-empt them, except by following their trail,” said Poindexter, who brought the idea to the Pentagon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and now is beginning to award contracts to high-technology vendors.
“The problem is much more complex, I believe, than we’ve faced before,” he said. “It’s how do we harness with technology the street smarts of people on the ground, on a global scale.”
Though formidable foreign policy and privacy hurdles remain before any prototype becomes operational, the initiative shows how far the government has come in its willingness to use information technology and expanded surveillance authorities in the war on terrorism.
Poindexter said it will take years to realize his vision, but the office has already begun providing some technology to government agencies. For example, Poindexter recently agreed to help the FBI build its data warehousing system. He’s also spoken to the Transportation Security Administration about aiding its development of a massive passenger profiling system.
In his first interview since he started the “information awareness” program, Poindexter, who figured prominently in the Iran-Contra scandal more than a decade ago, said the systems under development would, among other things, help analysts search randomly for indications of travel to risky areas, suspicious e-mails, odd fund transfers and improbable medical activity, such as the treatments of anthrax sores. Much of the data would be collected through computer “appliances” -- some mixture of hardware and software -- that would, with permission of governments and businesses, enable intelligence agencies to routinely extract information.
Some specialists question whether the technology Poindexter envisions is even feasible, given the immense amount of data it would handle. Other question whether it is diplomatically possible, given the sensitivities about privacy around the world. But many agree, if implemented as planned, it probably would be the largest data surveillance system ever built.
Paul Werbos, a computing and artificial-intelligence specialist at the National Science Foundation, doubted whether such “appliances” can be calibrated to adequately filter out details about innocent people that should not be in the hands of the government. “By definition, they’re going to send highly sensitive, private personal data,” he said. “How many innocent people are going to get falsely pinged? How many terrorists are going to slip through?”
Former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., a member of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, said there’s no question about the need to use data more effectively. But he criticized the scope of Poindexter’s program, saying it is “total overkill of intelligence” and a potentially “huge waste of money.”
“There’s an Orwellian concept if I’ve ever heard one,” Hart said when told about the program.
Poindexter said any operational system would include safeguards to govern the collection of information. He said rules built into the software would identify users, create an audit trail and govern the information available.
But Poindexter said his mission is to develop the technology, not the policy. It would be up to Congress and policymakers to debate the issue and establish limits that would make the system politically acceptable. “We’re just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy,” he said.
Getting the Defense Department job is something of a comeback for Poindexter. A former national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan, he was convicted in 1990 of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing congressional inquiries into the Iran-contra affair, which involved the secret sale of arms to Iran in the mid-1980s and diversion of profits to help the contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Poindexter, a retired Navy rear admiral, was the highest-ranking Regan administration official found guilty in the scandal. He was sentenced to six months in jail by a federal judge who called him “the decision-making head” of a scheme to deceive Congress. A U.S. Court of Appeals overturned that conviction in 1991, saying Poindexter’s rights had been violated through the use of testimony he had given to Congress after being granted immunity.
In recent years, he has worked as a DARPA contractor at Syntek Technologies Inc., an Arlington, Va., consulting firm that helped develop technology to search through large amounts of data.