Total Information Awareness

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Seal of the Information Awareness Office[1][2]
(motto: lat. scientia est potentia – knowledge is power[3])

Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a program of the US Information Awareness Office. It was operated from February until May 2003, before being renamed as the Terrorism Information Awareness Program.[4][5]

Based on the concept of predictive policing, TIA aimed to gather detailed information about individuals in order to anticipate and prevent crimes before they are committed.[6] As part of efforts to win the War on Terror, the program searched for all sorts of personal information in the hunt for terrorists around the globe.[7] According to Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), TIA was the "biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States".[8]

The program was suspended in late 2003 by the United States Congress after media reports criticized the government for attempting to establish "Total Information Awareness" over all citizens.[9][10][11]

Although the program was formally suspended, its data mining software was later adopted by other government agencies, with only superficial changes being made. According to a 2012 New York Times article, the legacy of Total Information Awareness is "quietly thriving" at the National Security Agency (NSA).[12]

History

File:Admiral John Poindexter, official Navy photo, 1985.JPEG
Adm. John Poindexter, the Director of the Information Awareness Office, who resigned in 2003 after TIA was dismantled by Congress[12]

Early developments

The earliest version of TIA employed a software called Groove, which was developed in 2000 by the American software industry entrepreneur and inventor of Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie. The software developed by Ozzie makes it possible for analysts at many different government agencies to share intelligence data instantly, and it links specialized programs that are designed to look for patterns of suspicious behavior.[13]

Congressional restrictions

On 24 January 2003, the United States Senate voted to limit the TIA program by restricting its ability to gather information from electronic mails and the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies.[14] Several months later, with increasing public outrage, Congress agreed to terminate the program and cease its funding.[15]

In May 2003, Total Information Awareness was renamed as Terrorist Information Awareness.[16]

Mission

The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program was to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists – and decipher their plans – and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts.

To that end, the TIA program objective is to create a counter-terrorism information system that:

1. Increases information coverage by an order of magnitude, and affords easy future scaling

2. Provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed

3. Automatically queues analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks

4. Supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and prospective courses of action.[17]

Scope of surveillance

As a "virtual, centralized, grand database”,[18] the scope of surveillance includes, among others, credit card purchases, magazine subscriptions, web browsing histories, academic grades, bank deposits, passport applications, driver's licenses, toll records, judicial records, divorce records, etc.[10]

Health information collected by TIA include drug prescriptions,[10] medical records,[19] and individual DNA.[20]

Criticism

Critics allege that the program could be abused by government authorities as part of their practice of mass surveillance in the United States. In an op-ed for The New York Times, the American author William Safire called it "the supersnoop's dream: a Total Information Awareness about every U.S. citizen."[10]

Hans Mark, a former director of defense research and engineering at the University of Texas, called it a "dishonest misuse of DARPA".[4]

The American Civil Liberties Union launched a campaign to terminate the full implementation of Total Information Awareness. If implemented, it would "kill privacy in America" because "every aspect of our lives would be catalogued".[21] The San Francisco Chronicle criticized the program for "Fighting terror by terrifying U.S. citizens".[22]

In popular culture

In the 2008 British television series The Last Enemy, Total Information Awareness (TIA) is portrayed as surveillance database that can be used to track and monitor anybody effectively by putting all available government information in one place.

See also

  • LifeLog - The U.S. government's log of an individual life[23]

References

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