'Orwellian' Data-Mining Program Draws Fire From All Sides

by Michelle Mittelstadt
The Dallas Morning News
December 16, 2002

WASHINGTON _The government says it is several years away from revving up a massive computer database that would scour Americans' personal and financial information in the name of hunting down foreign terrorists.

But a loose-knit coalition of civil libertarians and privacy groups from all political stripes isn't waiting to mobilize against the Defense Department research project initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Total Information Awareness: It's a lofty _ and for some a chilling _ title for a data-mining program being developed by a Pentagon research division that has spawned countless innovative technologies, perhaps most prominently the Internet.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency acknowledges that its Total Information Awareness database, which received scant public or congressional attention until hitting the media radar screen last month, would be "of an unprecedented scale."

The experimental project would represent a new computer architecture allowing the government to roam through a swath of private and public databases and suck in huge volumes of data that would be crunched through computer algorithms to detect unusual patterns.

Americans' medical and educational records, credit histories, car rentals and airline reservations, magazine subscriptions, banking transactions, e-mail and instant messaging traffic and criminal convictions would be swept through the DARPA database. So would their gun purchases, credit card records, prescriptions, driver's licenses and more.

"The key to fighting terrorism is information," according to a DARPA fact sheet.

What DARPA describes in dry, bureaucratic language as a next-generation counterterrorism tool, critics view as nothing less than a first step towards an all-knowing, Big Brother government.

"It's an Orwellian vision, pure and simple," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, among the groups hoping to derail the project before it becomes reality. "The idea behind it that we have to sift everything to find the bad guy _ and that means delving into every American's daily life and credit cards and plane flights and book purchases and whatever _ that's pretty fairly monstrous."

Stirring the waters even further is that the man behind the program has a history of withholding information from lawmakers and was, in fact, convicted of lying to Congress.

Defense Department officials insist the critics' rhetoric and concerns are overblown. In an era of vulnerability to terrorism, Americans want technologies to provide specific information that intelligence and law enforcement agencies can act on to thwart terrorists, Defense Undersecretary Pete Aldridge told reporters last month.

"We all share the frustration associated with vague warnings of terrorist threats," he said, offering the Bush administration's most expansive explanation to date of the controversial project. "We hope that TIA will help the U.S. government narrow those generic . . . reports down to advance notice of specific threatening acts."

Total Information Awareness would be equipped with built-in privacy safeguards, Aldridge said, and subjected to the same legal protections that law enforcement agencies are required to follow.

Critics don't accept those assurances, in part because they are deeply skeptical about the program's creator.

Total Information Awareness is the brainchild of retired Adm. John Poindexter, who approached the Pentagon with the concept after the terrorist attacks. Now head of DARPA's Information Awareness Office _ whose motto is "Knowledge is Power" _ Poindexter has stressed that the data-mining project would be established in such a way to "ensure that the private information on innocent citizens is protected."

But Poindexter's past offers cold comfort to his detractors.

They note that as President Reagan's national security adviser, Poindexter was a passionate advocate for greater secrecy. He also was convicted in 1990 of lying to Congress and obstructing congressional inquiries into the Iran-Contra scandal. The convictions were overturned on appeal.

"Because of his behavior in the '80s, we know what type of person he is," said Lisa Dean, director of the Center for Technology Policy at the conservative Free Congress Foundation, another opponent of Total Information Awareness. "We know he is not trustworthy."

Defense Department officials stress that Poindexter is involved only in developing the project and would not run it.

Nor would DARPA, Aldridge said. If the project proves successful, DARPA would hand the technology over to the Department of Homeland Security or other intelligence and law enforcement entities, he said.

Opposition to the project is by no means unanimous.

Total Information Awareness "is what the public, Congress and many in the policy community have rightly been demanding since 9-11: a methodology for putting the pieces of the terrorism puzzle together in order to prevent another 9-11 while respecting fundamental American civil liberties," the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said in a recent memo.

Still, there's been a sustained outcry from liberals and conservatives alike since the project came into full view last month, having crept into being with little congressional or public attention.

From retiring House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas and the Eagle Forum on the right to the ACLU and People for the American Way on the left, many are raising questions about the project's privacy and constitutional implications.

"Right now, the only thing that is scary to me is this DARPA thing," Armey said recently. "They don't need that much information about who we are, what our transactions are, who we do business with and who we talk to on the phone."

More than two-dozen civil liberties, civil rights and privacy groups complained in a recent letter to congressional leaders that Total Information Awareness lacks any oversight or accountability safeguards. They also said DARPA is stymieing their efforts to learn more about the project, refusing to release information that should be available under the Freedom of Information Act.

One of the groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, has gone to court to force the Defense Department to explain the scope of the project, its potential impact on the rights of Americans, and how it would operate.

The center and its allies are trying to drum up grassroots opposition to the data-mining program. They also are energizing their allies on Capitol Hill.

"I haven't seen any indication that (the administration) is willing to rethink it, but I don't think that is the end of the story," said the center's general counsel, David Sobel.

Lawmakers in both political parties are serving notice that they'll be asking some pointed questions when Congress reconvenes in January.

The incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, will probably hold oversight hearings on the topic, a spokeswoman said. And another powerful Republican, Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, is questioning the use of defense funds to do research for a database that would be used by intelligence or law enforcement agencies.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Sen. Tom Harkin said the proposed data-mining project "causes me serious concern about how it would affect the constitutional right to privacy for all law-abiding Americans."

The Iowa Democrat, who serves on the subcommittee that controls the Pentagon's purse strings, called on the Defense Department to explain what information would be sifted and what checks and balances would be put in place to protect law-abiding citizens. If the answers aren't forthcoming, the senator will ask that Poindexter be summoned to testify, said Harkin spokesman Bill Burton.

Two other influential Appropriations Committee members, Democratic Sens. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Dianne Feinstein of California, said they will seek to cut off new funds until Congress considers the merits of the project.

If the program is not developed within tight guidelines and carefully overseen by Congress, "it could lead to an Orwellian America where a person's every move is tracked by the government," Feinstein said. "I find this deeply disturbing."

Feinstein complained that the program already has been funded to the tune of $200 million over the last three years without any input from Congress.

"In my view, Congress needs to consider the full implications of the project on privacy and civil liberties now, before the genie is out of the bottle," she said.

The critics are pressing to kill Total Information Awareness before it becomes a full-blown reality.

"Once this is put in place and implemented, it's not going to go away," said Dean of the Free Congress Foundation.

While Total Information Awareness is a concern for many in the privacy movement, some are more focused currently on a database that could come on line far sooner: The Transportation Security Agency's CAPPS II, or Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System.

CAPPS II, which could be in place next year, will profile airline passengers by scanning government and private databases to rank their potential as security threats. Motor vehicle, credit bureau, financial, Social Security, IRS, and FBI databases are among those expected to be included in the TSA database, which is an expansion of a profiling system in place since the mid-1990s.

"CAPPS II is much closer to reality than TIA," Tien said.

(Dallas Morning News correspondent G. Robert Hillman in Washington contributed to this report.)

(c) 2002, The Dallas Morning News.

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