CNN: CIA report: No issue with spy agency's partnership with N.Y. police

According to a CIA investigation, the CIA is doing no wrong by collaborating with the NY Police Department in "covert surveillance" of Muslims in NYC.  "The CIA inspector general has completed a review of the CIA's relationship with the NYPD and has found no violation of law or executive order on the part of CIA," said agency spokesman Preston Golson. "The IG also found no evidence that any part of the agency's support to the NYPD constituted 'domestic spying.'"

Um.. so, we can trust the CIA to police itself?  Really?

Maybe something got lost along the way between Sept 11, 2011 and the Homeland Security Department and other things. 

The CIA is supposed to only be for use outside the U.S. and its use inside the U.S. is supposed to be illegal.  The phrase above, 'domestic spying', is key as that's what would be illegal. 

There is a slippery slope situation that's akin to the old rules for financial institutions that kept various financial services in separate companies.  One part of the financial collapse was the repeal of those old rules, and the subsequent merger of financial institutions allowing services that should have been kept in separate companies to be done by single companies.  While that probably contributed to some kind of efficiency in the financial institutions, it gave financial institutions opportunities to screw with the system and commit questionable practices that eventually messed things up.  I'm sorry, I didn't say that very well.

In any case the thing here is to draw a sharp distinction between the agencies that fight off threats from foreign countries, and the agencies that maintain internal stability within the country.  There are distinct policy and strategical differences between being focused on external enemies, or focused on your own people.  It's inappropriate to use the forces who are trained to fight enemies on your own people, because your own people are not enemies.

Well, except, that is, there's been an effort to label Muslims who live in the U.S. as potential enemies.  That's a sad side result of the Sept 11 attacks.


CIA report: No issue with spy agency's partnership with N.Y. police

Doing a little searching turned up: NYPD And CIA Had Secret “Mosque Crawlers” Operation

The NYPD has developed a massive domestic spying operation and is operating well outside the boundaries of NYC.  NYPD police officers are getting training from the CIA on spying techniques.  The CIA is working with NYPD. 

The targets are minority communities, especially Muslims.

The article describes it as "trolling", namely just scanning everything in the minority neighborhoods.  The NYPD is quoted with a denial of this, and says they're "simply following leads".

A key person in this is David Cohen, a retired 35-year veteran of the CIA, who became the NYC police department’s first civilian intelligence chief.  He had been a high ranking CIA officer.  Cohen’s tenure as head of CIA operations, the nation’s top spy, was so contentious that in 1997, The New York Times editorial page took the unusual step of calling for his ouster.

After Cohen came on board, the CIA Director George Tenet assigned Larry Sanchez to serve as a CIA officer, on CIA payroll, but operating inside the NYPD.  He had full access to CIA resources, as an operative working inside the NYPD.

There had never been an arrangement like it, and some senior CIA officials soon began questioning whether Tenet was allowing Sanchez to operate on both sides of the wall that’s supposed to keep the CIA out of the domestic intelligence business.

Cohen created a secret squad that would soon infiltrate Muslim neighborhoods, according to several current and former officials directly involved in the program.  This involved assigning NYPD police officers from specific ethnic backgrounds to infiltrate neighborhoods with matching ethnic backgrounds.  These officers were called "rakers" and were charged with hanging out, observing, looking everywhere for "hot spots".

Cohen said he wanted the squad to “rake the coals, looking for hot spots,” former officials recalled. The undercover officers soon became known inside the department as rakers.

Federal Reserve looking to launch "sentiment analysis and social media monitoring" program

A couple weeks ago the Federal Reserve Board of New York floated an RFP (Request for Proposals) for a program of "sentiment analysis" of social media networks.   I've embedded the scribd version of the doRFP below for your reading pleasure.

They seek to "to establish a fair andequitable partnership with a market leader who will who gather data from various social media outlets and newssources and provide applicable reporting to FRBNY."

The idea is for the Federal Reserve to have a system to monitor traffic on online social networks, gather the discussions, extract "sentiments" (thoughts, opinions) about the Federal Reserve, and report them to the FRB.

In part the issue here isn't so much that they're doing this - plenty of organizations are doing this already, and it's fair for organizations to want to know what is being said about them.  "Sentiment analysis" via monitoring social media is the act of summarizing what people are saying in online networks (twitter, facebook, etc) to extract information that's useful to the organization.   As they themselves say: "There is need for the Communications Group to be timely and proactively aware of the reactions and opinionsexpressed by the general public as it relates to the Federal Reserve and its actions on a variety of subjects."

In part the issue is that this is a pseudo-branch-of-government intent on tracking every conversation, and in particular "reach out to key bloggers and influencers" plausibly so they can control the messages from those key bloggers and influencers?

In part the issue is that the RFP timeline is it was issued on Sept 16, 2011, and that they expect a response (proposal) by Sept 28, 2011.  The two week timeline implies that there are software companies who have already developed this sort of service.  The FRB seems to expect the service can just be deployed (perhaps after the expenditure of many $$$'s of consultant time for training, installation, and support).

Their stated purpose is:

Social media listening platforms are solutions that gather data from various social media outlets and news sources.They monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria. They can also determine the sentiment of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or document.

The information gathered can guide the organizations public relations group in assessing the effectiveness of communication strategies.

Here are some of the services it can offer:

• Track reach and spread of your messages and press releases
• Handle crisis situations
• Continuously monitor conversations
• Identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers
• Spot emerging trends, discussions themes and topics

 

Solution requirements:

A. Geographic scope of social media sites

The solution must support content coming from different countries and geographical regions. It should also support multiple languages.

B. Content and Data Types

The solution must be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms –Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube. It should also be able to aggregate data from various media outlets such as: CNN, WSJ, Factiva etc.

C. Reports and Metrics

The solution must provide real-time monitoring of relevant conversations. It should provide sentiment analysis (positive, negative or neutral) around key conversational topics.  It must be able to provide summaries or high level overviews of a specific set of topics. It should have a configurable dashboard that can easily be accessed by internal analysts or management. The dashboard must support customization by user or group access. The solution should provide an alerting mechanism that automatically sends out reports or notifications based a predefined trigger.

D. FRBNY Technology Integration

The solution must be able to integrate with existing FRBNY technologies such as: Google Search appliance, Lotus notes suite and web trends.  It must have support for single sign on or windows integrated authentication.

E. Cost Structure

The solution should offer a flexible pricing structure that can support multiple user licensing. It should also have the option to base pricing on content volume and usage. _Supplier acknowledges an understanding of and agrees to comply with the above minimum solutions requirements.

 

Frbny Social Media Rfp

Total Information Awareness project spawns big brother system to read and translate twitter traffic

Today NPR ran a piece on University of Buffalo Computer scientist Rohini Srihari who is developing automated translation software which can be aimed at social networks allowing english speaking folk to read non-english tweets. Maybe this sounds benign, after all Google Chrome has some of this ability built in. In another tab as I write I have a french web-page open which Chrome translated for me into semi-readable text. It's really useful having automated language translation because it can help us connect more readily with each other over the Internet. So why did I put an alarmist title on this post? It's because of the Dept of Defense Total Information Awareness system, and that Dr. Srihari's research is funded by the U.S. Military.

In case you've forgotten what TIA is, this occurred several dozen alarming revelations ago in the months after GW Bush was elected and remained public until some time in 2002. The TIA project was headed by (ret) Admiral Poindexter (the guy convicted of lying to congress during the Iran-Contra period) to apply modern datamining technology to national security intelligence activities. The intent is to create an all-encompassing system of tracking a huge amount of information (total information awareness), look for "patterns" indicating nefarious activities, and nip them in the bud early.

This was one of the first articles I posted way back in 2002: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate ... The Defense Department pages referenced are no longer public, but I did a comprehensive summary of the program.

Dr. Rohini's project doesn't fit neatly into the projects cited under the TIA umbrella back in 2002, however many of the projects were associated with language translation. This way the US Intelligence Community could hire anybody, rather than rely on language/social experts, for intelligence analysts.

As the NPR piece said: "One way to follow what's going on in the Middle East and South Asia right now is through social media — Facebook, Twitter and blog posts." This is called "open source intelligence" or intelligence gathering from sources out in the open.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are awesome but one side effect is they force global social conversations to be conducted in the open where "anybody" can listen in. While that's kinda cool in the light of creating more connection between everyone on a global scale, it does mean that spies can snoop on everything.

What if, for example, the spies are looking for signs of an impending uprising against a brutal dictator who happens to be friendly to the United States, and receives lots of United States funding and equipment and training which increases the effectiveness of that dictators military forces? The U.S. routinely does this, support government leaders who are brutal to their people. Mubarak, the recently deposed leader of Egypt, was one of those brutal dictators.

What will the U.S. spies do if they notice the impending uprising? Stand back and applaud the revolution? Or do something that will help the brutal dictator stay in power? If the U.S. has invested so much money in maintaining a particular government structure (no matter how brutal) wouldn't they act to protect their investment?

As Dr. Rohini said: "What I want is to determine who are the people, places and things being talked about," she says. "Is there an opinion being expressed? Is it a positive or negative opinion being expressed?" And... "And when you are able to figure out what the topic of the conversation is," she says, "what kind of sentiment is being expressed around that, that's the goal of what we are trying to do." And... "So in Twitter posts and tweets and so on, if there's specific factual information that's being mentioned — they want that extracted," Srihari says. "There's also definitely an interest in sentiment and opinion mining."

Who's to say that foreigners speaking their local languages aren't the only group being targeted by the total information vacuuming project? Perhaps they're also vacuuming up social network conversations by Americans? Don't believe me? See: Twitter Tapping - government agents tracking public information

Other related articles:

Total Information Awareness lives on...

Another brick to building the Total Information Awareness system

Massive privacy violation by U.S. government

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

Links: 

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135049784/computer-translator-reads-between-the-tw...

Is the U.S. Army "Training with Industry" program a big brother style of PSYOPS project?

The Democracy Now headlines for Oct 4 relates a post by the news blog Upshot that "... revealed the US Army has used local CBS television affiliates in Georgia and North Carolina as training posts for some of its psychological-operations personnel. Active-duty soldiers worked at the stations WRAL and WTOC as part of the Army’s Training with Industry Program. The PSYOPS soldiers learned broadcasting and communications expertise that they could apply in their mission to influence the emotions, motives and ultimately the behavior of foreign audiences." Having Army personnel occupying seats in newsrooms raises eery questions of journalistic freedom and whether they are manipulating the news that we receive. By using the label "PSYOPS soldiers," Democracy Now and The Upshot are certainly raising the question of news manipulation by the Army.

One might think that the U.S. is not a dictatorship whose media cannot be trusted. The media model in America is independence and journalists who are free to write whatever they wish. Unfortunately the true practice of journalism does not live up to that idealistic model, and journalists in America have often worked with the government to manipulate the news. A recent example is the collaboration with the NY Times journalist Judith Miller to plant news articles containing official lies and bogus intelligence leading up to the 2003 illegal U.S. invasion of and making war upon Iraq. Those lies planted by Judith Miller in the news led to the war on Iraq, the wastage of zillions of dollars of U.S. resources, the wastage of thousands of U.S. lives, and the tarnishing of U.S. image worldwide. That was by no means the only such case, and a quick yahoogling with "America media manipulation" turns up Project Mockingbird, a CIA project begun in 1950 to manipulate American and Foreign media. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

The word PSYOPS (a.k.a. Psychological Operations) are "planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals." In other words, PSYOPS is the planting of lies to influence events. You could also spin PSYOPS as the planting of propaganda, and it need not involve lies because the selective use of information can perpetuate a slanted view of reality without ever uttering a lie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Operations_(United_States)

An example of "white PSYOPS" is flying a helicopter over a village and dropping leaflets. What we're concerned about is black PSYOPS that may be committed by Army soldiers occupying American newsrooms and potentially telling journalists what stories to cover and their content.

The Upshot report states that since at least 2001 two CBS stations regularly hosted active-duty soldiers from the Army's 4th Psychological Operations unit as part of the Army Training With Industry program. Their report is based on documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request. Let's make no bones about this, these soldiers were assigned to a PSYOPS unit. The question is what were they doing?

The U.S. Army website includes a 2003 press release describing a TWI program in the Army Acquisition Support Center (see: Training with Industry Orientation Preps Officers on their New Roles as Army Acquisition Corps Ambassadors http://asc.army.mil/news/archives/twi.cfm) as a kind of work-study program. These officers are placed within partner companies to learn civilian management and leadership techniques, so they can better interface with companies from whom the Army is acquiring supplies. Yahoogling the phrase "Army Training With Industry" turns up other TWI programs in other military branches, each of which is a similar kind of work-study program enabling Army personnel to learn the ways of industrial corporations. A Wikipedia page reports the program was begun in the 1940's during WWII but was supposedly disbanded after that war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Within_Industry

Supposedly the soldiers in question were in newsrooms to "learn best practices in terms of programming and production side that they can use when they deploy." The Upshot report contains quotes saying that the soldiers were there to learn, they were not controlling the journalistic output, and "It was like shadowing."

Taking this at face value, this program is not direct media manipulation. Instead it's meant to train soldiers who will eventually be creating bogus propagandistic news stories.

VISIBUILDING and other advanced technologies

URL: 

At DARPA, the Future is Now

http://www.darpa.mil/sto/smallunitops/visibuilding.html

http://www.isrjournal.com/story.php?F=1957524

Military Researchers Seek Ways to ‘Interrogate’ Buildings

VisiBuilding: ISR for Building Interiors

Wireless that works

Seeing Through Walls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vSrDTTvZtQ&eurl=http://defense-update.com/featur...

Description: 

An article about some advanced technologies being developed. The most interesting to me is VISIBUILDING which is a kind of mechanized clairvoyance that allows soldiers to look through walls and see enemies.

The VisiBuilding program will address a pressing need in urban warfare: seeing inside buildings. Our troops are increasingly being deployed in urban areas, where they no longer have the benefit of dominance in surveillance and reconnaissance once the adversary retreats indoors.

Another program recently launched at DARPA is 'Harnessing Infrastructure for Building Reconnaissance' (HIBR), a capability that translates VisiBuilding into practical terms: DARPA believes that 'opportunistic sensing' could be a practical approach to 'guess' such interior structure, using exterior observations.

extvideo: 

Local 2 Investigates Police Secrecy Behind Unmanned Aircraft Test

The Houston Texas police department gets caught secretly testing Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) by the local TV station. The police department staged a demonstration at a farm 70 miles from town, inviting only the officialdom, and the invitations read "NO MEDIA ALLOWED". Somehow the local TV station learned of the event and sent out a their "news chopper" to record the test. That then caused the police department to go ahead and disclose the project at a "hastily organized news conference".

Article Reference: 

Local 2 Investigates Police Secrecy Behind Unmanned Aircraft Test

extvideo: 

U.S. Intelligence Official wants us to transform what we think is privacy, which makes me worried

US intelligence official: You get privacy when your definition matches ours seems somewhat reasonable once I get past my initial shock. The article discusses statements by "Donald Kerr, a top intelligence official with the US government" who suggests most peoples definition of "privacy" is antiquated, and that we need to change our belief about privacy. And my initial reaction was "of course that's what you think, because you want to spy on us".

See... while it's idealistic to think governments have our best interests at heart, that government officials are acting from altruistic notions of service and the betterment of us all, that's not always how it happens. Government officials are also looking for ways to more efficiently do their job and especially it's easy for law enforcement to think everybody's a criminal and they need stronger techniques to catch the criminals that are slipping through the cracks. Which means they need better surveillance, more ubiquitous spying, essentially big brother.

But this guy has an interesting point that's worth pondering. He draws a distinction between privacy and anonymity. As a practical matter anonymity is harder to achieve nowadays. Try going to the corner store to get a snack.. how are you going to pay for it? That credit card transaction gets recorded by who knows how many institutions, and it identifies that someone used your card to buy something, and it might even know what you bought. So you might think it's innocent to buy packets of cigarette rolling papers every week, but some computer might put two and two together, notice that you're also buying a lot of gardening supplies, and then send a note to the police that you might be growing marijuana.

Let's not dance around this... the credit card corporations know a lot about what you're doing. It is so convenient nowadays to buy using credit cards, and that means the majority of your transactions are recorded. They know your travels by watching when and where you use the card(s) and they know your habits by watching what you buy and where you spend.

As the article says: It's cliché, but Benjamin Franklin long ago warned against rhetoric that demands trading individual rights for corporate security. Asking Americans to greenlight extensive, unchecked electronic surveillance by changing their very definition of privacy is a prime example of such rhetoric.

Can we really trust the assurances of a government agent? Especially when it comes in the context of the government trying to retroactively justify the illegal warrantless wiretapping and other spying that has been perpetrated on U.S. Citizens?

It's worth reading about this project which had been publicly conducted by U.S. Intelligence agencies. Their thought was to apply the sort of data mining that's common in businesses, and utilize it in government spying operations. There was a hullabaloo raised over these programs in 2001-2 but the programs have continued, under different names, under expanded mandates, and under tighter secrecy. DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

It's worth thinking about the idea put forward by Mr. Kerr. Corporations are already knowing waaay too much about us than is reasonable for our past conception of what privacy should be. It is probably too late to put the genie back in the bottle, because what has created this erosion of privacy is the sort of technological revolution which has created the World Wide Web. However what ought to be happening is clear laws and standards of conduct around protection of privacy, and clear and strong penalties for violating such standards.

Links: 

US intelligence official: You get privacy when your definition matches ours

External Media

F.B.I. Data Mining Reached Beyond Initial Targets

"The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records... The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” — the network of people that the target was in contact with.... central to a data-mining technique intelligence officials call link analysis." etc..

I've written on this before: Massive privacy violation by U.S. government and Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - New York Times

The idea is that government spy agencies are applying data-mining techniques which is now possible with new computer technologies. In a way they're being smart and simply applying techniques already used by businesses allowing business activity to be more accurately targeted.

But with any increase in government surveillance it raises fears of intrusive government surveillance such as described by George Orwell in his book 1984. Certainly there is an example of what computer technology can do in the hands of an overzealous government. The extremely primitive not-quite-computer technology of the 1930's and 1940's, developed by IBM, was used by Nazi Germany to enact the Jewish Holocaust.

The exact issue in todays article is tracking the "envelope" information of telephone calls, and to draw a web of connections between people. When you call someone a record is made somewhere of the phone call, the number called from, the target phone number, the time of the call, and its length. This is the "envelope" and is similar to the paper envelope used to send mail through the post office. If you track enough of these phone calls you can see patterns of who is calling whom.

Article Reference: 

F.B.I. Data Mining Reached Beyond Initial Targets

AASIN: 

1984 (Signet Classics)

Son of TIA Will Mine Asian Data

The Total Information Awareness system was an overarching plan for ubiquitous spying upon U.S. citizens and essentially upon "all" commerce and other activity which the U.S. spies might think to call a threat. It was later named the Terrorism Information Awareness system, because Terrorism became a big thing. Either way TIA promised to become the worst of our Big Brother fears. In 2003 the public became aware of the system and a bruhahahaha happened in Congress with a public shutdown of the project, including Admiral Poindexter having to resign from working for DARPA on the project.

The Wired article discusses a version of TIA developed by Singapore. The unveiling ceremony was led by, er, Admiral Poindexter. One of the project leaders had worked in DARPA on the TIA project. Hmm...

The article talks about adjustment to the plan based on the reaction seen in the U.S.A. The Singapore version is concentrating on "open source" intelligence data, which would be all the information published in the open. This would include news articles, blog postings, etc.

U.S. program for monitoring "open source intelligence": Re: Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.

My original TIA coverage is here: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

Article Reference: 

Son of TIA Will Mine Asian Data

Re: The government is reading your mail

The government is reading your mail concerns a signing statement perpetrated by Pres Bush along with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. I haven't read the act but it's apparently a general, across the board, enactment of changes that cover a broad range of issues. At issue is one section of the President's Statement on H.R. 6407, the "Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act". A section which deals with the opening of first class mail.

Back in May 2005 the administration attempted to Expand the "PATRIOT" act and beef up the governments powers to snoop on first class mail. First class mail is the regular stamped envelope mail that we used to use to send letters to one another (before E-Mail).

There is a long-standing power the government has to record "mail covers". The mail cover is the outside of the envelope, things like names and addresses, etc. The government has long had the power to record this information, effectively to take a picture of every piece of mail going through the post office. And if you ponder it for a moment, clearly that much information can be of use to investigators to establish links between individuals.

The signing statement includes this paragraph:

The executive branch shall construe subsection 404(c) of title 39, as enacted by subsection 1010(e) of the Act, which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection, in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances, such as to protect human life and safety against hazardous materials, and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection.

So.. the President is now asserting a new power, a power to open mail. The justifications are for hazardous materials inspection or to protect human life, noble causes no doubt, but also include "foreign intelligence collection". This is the administration who is already illegally wiretapping U.S. citizens and who knows what other illegal spying they're doing.

Defense Department funds massive speech recognition and translation program

Defense Department funds massive speech recognition and translation program describes U.S. government research spookily like the The Total Information Awareness System. TIA was a research program bent on developing a wide range of technologies that would be put together to vastly upgrade the U.S. Intelligence gathering abilities. The TIA system was noticed by the public, a hue and cry was raised, some Congress people harrumphed and caused DARPA to make some changes that appeared like they shut TIA down, but most of the projects that TIA was made of continued on.

Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) is simply the continuation of that research, under a different name. I am surprised arsTechnica missed the connection.

They describe it as automatic speech recognition of any spoken language, and automatic language translation of written text into English. The third component is a "distillation" engine which can answer questions and summarize information.

The stated goal is to capture all the public communications like TV broadcasts, newspaper articles, blog postings, etc, and sift them through a giant computerized mixmaster. The software would automatically sift through the massive quantities of information and they supposedly hope to find terrorists or other threats more easily. All communications have to be translated to English because of the lack of linguists to manually translate these communications.

It's a three step process. Stage one is to capture all capturable communications, and translate it into written text. Stage two is to translate the written text to English. Stage three is to sift through the massive piles of data and make sense of it.

If they only apply this program to public communications there isn't much to quibble about. Public communications are, well, public. And there is a lot of valuable intelligence that can be gathered by reading foreign newspapers and the like.

But are they likely to stop at public communications? This is the government that launched illegal wiretapping of U.S. Citizens in direct violation of federal law, and then lied to Congress.

It's well known the U.S. government has been tapping e-mail and other forms of "signals" intelligence for a long time. Supposedly these taps have to be associated with court orders and have to be targeted at specific individuals. But those legalisms assume the government agents are going to act with integrity and do only what the law allows them to do. Again, our current government administration has proven over and over they have no qualms about ignoring and violating U.S. law.

Re: Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.

Four and a half years ago I wrote about: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate. The Total Information Awareness (TIA) project had just been revealed, and this was before the harumphing that later drove the program underground. The goal of the TIA was to bring together a variety of technologies such as datamining, language translation, sparse data analysis, and use those technologies to drastically increase the ability of U.S. Government spooks to know what's going on. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks "they" claimed to want better ability to predict and prevent the next terrorist attack. But at the same time the whole program just seemed like the reincarnation of Big Brother.

In Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S. the NY Times is publicising a research program that smacks of the TIA. If you follow the above link you'll see the list of programs that was publicised on the TIA web site in early 2002. This NY Times article discusses a research effort to track news articles, these are said to be foreign news articles, and automatically detect statements which might help the spooks figure out terror threats. Looking at the list of TIA projects you can easily identify several that apply to this project.

Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES): covers automatic translation of crucial information from foreign languages to English.

Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (WAE): Involves detecting patterns indicating terroristical actions.

Genisys: Covers a different effort to track terroristical actions, involving identification of people and groups.

There's several considerations at play with this. First it is clearly a priority of government officials to protect their citizens. That means the U.S. Intelligence agencies clearly have a role to detect and prevent threats to the U.S. Clearly there are groups who would use terror or geurilla tactics to attack the U.S. Clearly modern technology gives the spooks a lot of capabilities along the lines of tracking information and making sense of widely scattered information.

An example of that technology when placed in the hands of average people is the cooperative research website. That website's primary purpose is to construct detailed timelines and connections between people and the actions they're taking in the world. It's well understood that a lot of data is published in the "public record" such as newspapers, but the snippets of information are widely spread from one story to the next. Only by drawing together dozens of threads spread over many news reports can you begin to get the whole picture.

That's what the U.S. Government research described in the NY Times article is meaning to do. But presumably the goal is to do this at a larger scale, and use automatic language translation and natural language processing to more rapidly tie together the pieces.

Where one begins to call this Big Brother is the fact that the technology doesn't know anything about morals. You can just as easily program those computers to track U.S. news media as it can foreign news media. And it is against U.S. law for the U.S. government agencies to spy on U.S. citizens or organizations.

And of course the software doesn't have to stop with news stories printed in the media. The software can just as easily be spidering the whole of the Internet just as Google and the other search engines are doing so. If the search engines can let us "search the Internet" then why couldn't the government set up their own server farm(s) to scoope up the Internet and do a similar analysis of the content?

And of course the software doesn't have to stop with national borders. The software can just as easily scoop up the whole of the Internet as it can to limit itself to foreign web sites.

Therefore when we have a U.S. Government who has been brazenly violating U.S. laws against spying on U.S. citizens, can we trust their assurances that this program will only be trained on foreign news sources?

UK examines civilian use of UAVs

UK examines civilian use of UAVs: Covers plans in the United Kingdom (UK) to deploy Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) for broad surveillance purposes in Great Britain. There are a range of positive uses envisioned, like helping firefighters track forest fires, or crowd control during public events.

Like in the U.S. the machines aren't currently allowed to fly in UK airspace. As it says in the article, every rule of flight has assumed a human would be in the cockpit and able to decide how to avoid obstacles or other aircraft. To resolve that issue the Astrea Project is studying UAV designs that allow them to operate in the airspace, cohabitating well with other (human occupied) aircraft.

Guardian coverage: On the horizon ... pilotless planes as fishermen's and firefighters' friends

Earlier coverage:

High Altitude Surveillance Aircraft

High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) - 'Eternal Planes' to watch over us

Electric airplane (UAV) stays aloft for 48 hours

Web sites: Unmanned Air Vehicles

Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment

URL: 

Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment

Description: 

ASTRAEA (Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment) is a national programme that focuses on the technologies, systems, facilities and procedures that will allow autonomous vehicles to operate safely and routinely in the UK.

Autonomous vehicles, such as unmanned air vehicles, will bring real economic, environmental and security benefits in many areas and ASTRAEA will position the UK at the very forefront of these opportunities.

Office of Surveillance Commissioners

URL: 

Office of Surveillance Commissioners

Description: 

The OSC's aim is to provide effective and efficient oversight of the conduct of covert surveillance and covert human intelligence sources by public authorities in Britain. In other words, they are endeavoring to run operations similar to Big Brother.

Real ID ... another step to "Big Brother"

Since the "secret government" has been meeting since September 11, 2001 we have to examine some of the acts of government in the light of "is this bringing on 'Big Brother'"? The "secret government" in question was triggered on September 11, 2001 when Richard Clarke declared a certain governmnet response (whose name I've forgotten), the effect of which was to disperse government leaders and beaurocrats to secret bunkers so that they can operate the reins of government in relative safety from attack.

The triggering of that secret government was described by Richard Clarke in his book Against All Enemies.

Another cause for concern is the Total Information Awareness system, later renamed to Terrorist Information Awareness system, before being canned when public uproar became too great. This gem was lead by Admiral Poindexter, who had previously been convicted of lying to Congress. Its purpose was establishing a widespread and highly invasive system of violating our individual rights to privacy.

FAQ: How Real ID will affect you (Published: May 6, 2005, 4:00 AM PDT, By Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com) The Real ID system is a proposal that's been attached to a bill providing more funding for this stupid illegal war we're fighting in Iraq. I suppose the idea is that, by attaching it to a sure-bet bill, nobody is going to vote against it, the President surely isn't going to veto it, and therefore it's certain to sail through Congress and become law. Regardless of whether we, the people, whom those people are supposed to be working for, want this or not.

What does that mean for me?
Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards.

Actually this isn't different from today, because we need to show identification to do all the above named things. The difference here is the type of ID card it is.

What's going to be stored on this ID card?
At a minimum: name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address, and a "common machine-readable technology" that Homeland Security will decide on. The card must also sport "physical security features designed to prevent tampering, counterfeiting, or duplication of the document for fraudulent purposes."
Homeland Security is permitted to add additional requirements--such as a fingerprint or retinal scan--on top of those. We won't know for a while what these additional requirements will be.

The physical implementation will likely be a "smart card". What's a smart card? Well, if you have visited a Kinko's copy center recently you will have had an opportunity to use a smart card to operate the copy machines. Or if you have an American Express "Blue" card, that's a smart card. My employer, Sun Microsystems, makes a smart card we call the "Java Card", and we use them for employee badges. The U.S. Military uses Java cards as the identification card as well.

The smart card is the same shape and size as a regular credit card. Embedded in it is a computer, with some contacts on the outside of the card. It also includes an RFID chip, just to add to the spooky big brother aspects no doubt. When you insert a smart card into a reader, the contacts take in power, start the CPU running, and the smart card reader interacts with the smart card exchanging data and instructions.

What's the justification for this legislation anyway?
Its supporters say that the Real ID Act is necessary to hinder terrorists, and to follow the ID card recommendations that the 9/11 Commission made last year.

It will "hamper the ability of terrorist and criminal aliens to move freely throughout our society by requiring that all states require proof of lawful presence in the U.S. for their drivers' licenses to be accepted as identification for federal purposes such as boarding a commercial airplane, entering a federal building, or a nuclear power plant," Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, said during the debate Thursday.

Uh, huh... It could also end up hampering our ability to move freely within our own society, and enjoy the freedoms we have fought hard to maintain over the two and a half centuries this country has existed.

Visit the Total Information Awareness system page, written originally in February 2002. The DoD pages referenced have since went away, because DARPA canceled the project as an official entity. However some of the sub-projects have continued to exist and move forward. It's instructive to study the picture those projects create.

Specifically, the intent clearly was to establish a surveillance system to track our every economic activity, our every travel, etc, all in the name of looking for patterns that indicate an impending attack or illegal activity.

Having an ID card of this sort, and requiring it for pretty much any activity, would be a required step towards establishing such a surveillance system. Namely ... Such an ID card, to be useful, would require sending some data to computers operated by the Department of Homeland Defense. The ID card won't be able to establish validity on its own. Instead it will have to be verified with DHD computers. Hence, the DHD computers will, as a side effect, know everywhere you take your card.
The credit card companies already know this, in that they already know every place you use your credit cards to buy anything. But the Real ID card would be used in more places than your credit card.

Hmmm.....