Calling Frank Church and Friends

During the 1970s I learned government in the context of a failed war and an imperial presidency. Now I watch as we repeat ourselves and I'm not even 45 yet. The failed war continues to take lives unnecessarily with no end before January 2009 likely. The imperial presidency's has barely been exposed. We have seen a memo justifying torture, secret prisons run by the CIA under who knows what, if any, rules, telecommunications companies admitting giving the government access to data on US citizens, and yet we may have only touched the surface.

This week we saw a bit more of how little W and friends respect the Constitution with details from former US Deputy Attoney General James B. Comey on the efforts of Bush to continue an illegal wiretapping program that even the conservative Republican Comey could not stomach. In short, W sent his Chief of Staff and then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez to get a hospitalized, drugged John Ashcroft to sign off on what his deptuy would not. Ashcroft is no fan of extensive civil liberties and had previously signed off to continue the program but he would not ignore the rule of law to this extent. W was forced to make some changes to the secret program.

Is this the same illegal wiretapping program that came to light previously and was widely debated or is it another program? We don't know. Why? It's classified. Does it have congressional approval? No. Why not? Because until last January congressional oversight of executive power had been placed in an undisclosed location by the Republican majority. Do we know what programs are mining data in pursuit of "national security." Not really. The GAO did produce a report for Democratic Sen. Akaka on the hundreds of data mining programs that exist throughout the government. The GAO did not have access to any classified materials so this is an incomplete examination. What we do know is that this administration believes the presidency has little if any constraints on its power as long it can be claimed to be under the role of Commander-in-Chief. With a "Global War on Terror" that means US citizens' constitutional protections don't restrict our "Commander Guy."

Thus, we need another Frank Church. Sen. Church's Select Committee investigated years of abuse of power by security agencies under both Democratic and Republican administration. Its investigations lead to the very laws that W and friends are likely violating to "protect us from terrorists." It is my strong suspicion that the access to date from telecommunications and other companies is being used in multiple programs to create the giant data mining and monitoring program that was nicknamed "Carnivore."

From the Electronic Privacy Information Center:

In November 2002, the New York Times reported that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was developing a tracking system called "Total Information Awareness" (TIA), which was intended to detect terrorists through analyzing troves of information. The system, developed under the direction of John Poindexter, then-director of DARPA's Information Awareness Office, was envisioned to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant.

TIA purported to capture the "information signature" of people so that the government could track potential terrorists and criminals involved in "low-intensity/low-density" forms of warfare and crime. The goal was to track individuals through collecting as much information about them as possible and using computer algorithms and human analysis to detect potential activity.

The project called for the development of "revolutionary technology for ultra-large all-source information repositories," which would contain information from multiple sources to create a "virtual, centralized, grand database." This database would be populated by transaction data contained in current databases such as financial records, medical records, communication records, and travel records as well as new sources of information. Also fed into the database would be intelligence data.

A key component of the TIA project was to develop data-mining or knowledge discovery tools that would sort through the massive amounts of information to find patterns and associations. TIA would also develop search tools such as Project Genoa, which Admiral Poindexter's former employer Syntek Technologies assisted in developing. TIA aimed to fund the development of more such tools and data-mining technology to help analysts understand and even "preempt" future action.

A further crucial component was the development of biometric technology to enable the identification and tracking of individuals. DARPA had already funded its "Human ID at a Distance" program, which aimed to positively identify people from a distance through technologies such as face recognition or gait recognition. A nationwide identification system would have been of great assistance to such a project by providing an easy means to track individuals across multiple information sources.

DARPA's Broad Agency Announcement 02-08 soliciting proposals from industry stated that the initial plan was for a five year research project into these various technologies. The interim goal was to build "leave-behind prototypes with a limited number of proof-of-concept demonstrations in extremely high risk, high payoff areas."

In September 2003, Congress eliminated funding for the controversial project and closed the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, which had developed TIA. This does not, however, necessarily signal the end of other government data-mining initiatives that are similar to TIA. Projects such as the Novel Intelligence from Massive Data within the Intelligence Community Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) will apparently move forward. The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration are also working on data-mining projects that will fuse commercial databases, public databases, and intelligence data and had meetings with TIA developers.

W and friends in and out of government will assure you that everything they do is for the security of America and its citizens. That's what all those agencies in the 1970s told Sen. Church as well. I suspect it will be only after W leaves office that we learn how fully our government has gathered information on all of us and what it has been used to create.

The privacy issues in the 21st Century involve governments and private companies. It is from private industry that the data is being mined. Companies who don't seem to mind selling private data to crooks so they can target the elderly. An extensive and full debate on who knows what and who can get what from the numerous data banks each of us has tied to our names is needed. But first we stop a president who sees himself as above the law.


"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security." Benjamin Franklin