Information Awareness Office

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The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying information technology to counter transnational threats to national security. The IAO mission was to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness". Following public criticism that the development and deployment of these technologies could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003.

Contents

1 Introduction
2 IAO research
3 The IAO logo
4 Inverse surveillance
5 Public criticism of the Information Awareness Office
6 References
7 External links

7.1 Media coverage
7.2 Academic articles
7.3 Critical views (established sources)
7.4 Critical views (less well recognized)
7.5 Proponent views

8 See also

Introduction

The IAO was established by DARPA after the events of 9/11 to bring several related DARPA projects together under the leadership of one technical office director in order to focus the development of advanced information technology to counter terrorist threats. Adm. John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan and convicted five-count felon, served as the first director of the IAO.

In FY2003 the IAO began funding research and development of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program (in May 2003, the program was renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness Program). Although TIA was only one of several IAO projects, many critics and news reports conflated TIA with other related research projects of the IAO, with the result that TIA came in popular usage to stand for an entire subset of IAO programs.

The TIA program itself was the "systems-level" program of the IAO that intended to integrate information technologies into a prototype system to provide tools to better detect, classify, and identify potential foreign terrorists with the goal to increase the probability that authorized agencies of the United States could preempt adverse actions. As a systems-level program of programs, TIA's goal was the creation of a "counterterrorism information architecture" that integrated technologies from other IAO programs (and elsewhere, as appropriate). The TIA program was researching, developing, and integrating technologies to virtually aggregate data, to follow subject-oriented link analysis, to develop descriptive and predictive models through data mining or human hypothesis, and to apply such models to additional datasets to identify terrorists and terrorist groups.

Among the other IAO programs that were intended to provide TIA with component data aggregation and automated analysis technologies were the Genisys, Genisys Privacy Protection, Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery, and Scalable Social Network Analysis programs.

The first mention of the IAO in the mainstream media came from New York Times reporter John Markoff on February 13, 2002 ([article]). Initial reports contained few details about the program. In the following months, as more information emerged about the scope of the TIA project, libertarians and civil libertarians became concerned over what they saw as the potential for the development of an Orwellian mass surveillance system.

On August 2 2002, Dr. Poindexter gave a speech at DARPAtech 2002 entitled "[Overview of the Information Awareness Office] in which he described the TIA program.

On November 14, 2002 the New York Times published a [column] by William Safire in which he claimed "[TIA] has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans." Safire has been "credited" with triggering the anti-TIA movement(see [Big Brother ...]).

In addition to the program itself, the involvement of Poindexter as director of the IAO also raised concerns among some, since he had been earlier convicted of lying to Congress and altering and destroying documents pertaining to the Iran-Contra Affair, although those convictions were later overturned on the technicality that the testimony used against him was protected.

On January 16, 2003, Senator Russ Feingold introduced [legislation] to suspend the activity of the IAO and the Total Information Awareness program pending a Congressional review of privacy issues involved. A similar measure introduced by Senator Ron Wyden would have prohibited the IAO from operating within the United States unless specifically authorized to do so by Congress, and would have shut the IAO down entirely 60 days after passage unless either the Pentagon prepared a report to Congress assessing the impact of IAO activities on individual privacy and civil liberties or the President certified the program's research as vital to national security interests. In February of 2003, Congress passed legislation suspending activities of the IAO pending a Congressional report of the office's activities (Consolidated Appropriations Resolution, 2003, No.108-7, Division M, §111(b) [signed Feb. 20, 2003]).

In response to this legislation, DARPA provided Congress on May 20, 2003 with a report on its activities ([executive summary]). In this report, IAO changed the name of the program to the Terrorism Information Awareness Program and emphasized that the program was not designed to compile dossiers on US citizens, but rather to research and develop the tools that would allow authorized agencies to gather information on terrorist networks. Despite the name change and these assurances, the critics continued to see the system as prone to potential misuse or abuse.

Thus, House and Senate negotiators included language in the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-87, § 8131, 117 Stat. 1054, 1102 (2003) signed into law by President Bush on October 1, 2003), prohibiting the further use of funds for the TIA program. Further, the Joint Explanatory Statement included in the conference committee report specifically directed that the IAO (the program manager for TIA) be terminated immediately (149 Cong. Rec. H8755—H8771 (Sept. 24, 2003). Notwithstanding the defunding of TIA and the closing of the IAO, several TIA projects continued to be funded under the classified annexes to the Defense and the Intelligence appropriation bills in 2003 and subsequently.

For example, several TIA projects were funded through the National Foreign Intelligence Program for foreign counterterrorism intelligence purposes by the National Security Agency as Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) under the classified annex to the 2004 DOD Appropriations Act as contemplated in §8131 thereof. Recent reports suggest that some of this activity is now part of the Disruptive Technology Office (DTO) reporting to the Director of National Intelligence.[link]

An unknown number of TIA's functions have been merged under the codename "Topsail".[link]

IAO research

IAO research was conducted along five major investigative paths: secure collaboration problem solving; structured discovery; link and group understanding; context aware visualization; and decision making with corporate memory.

Among the IAO projects that TIA was intended to integrate were:

[Genisys] aimed at developing technologies for virtual data aggregation in order to support effective analysis across heterogeneous databases as well as unstructured public data sources, such as the World Wide Web.

Genisys Privacy Protection technology to ensure personal privacy and protect sensitive intelligence sources and methods in the context of increasing use of data analysis for detecting, identifying and tracking terrorist threats. These technologies were intended to enable greater access to data for security reasons while protecting privacy by providing critical data to analysts while not allowing access to unauthorized information, focusing on anonymized transaction data and exposing identity only if evidence warrants and appropriate authorization is obtained for further investigation, and ensuring that any misuse of data can be detected and addressed.

[Genoa] and [Genoa II] focused on providing advanced decision-support and collaboration tools to rapidly deal with and adjust to dynamic crisis management and allow for inter-agency collaboration in real-time.

[Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery] (EELD) development of technologies and tools for automated discovery, extraction and linking of sparse evidence contained in large amounts of classified and unclassified data sources

Scalable Social Network Analysis aimed at developing techniques based on social network analysis for modeling the key characteristics of terrorist groups and discriminating these groups from other types of societal groups.

Among the IAO projects focused on language translation were:

[Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text] (EARS) to develop automatic speech-to-text transcription technology whose output is substantially richer and much more accurate than previously possible. This program focused on translating spoken language (whether from broadcasts, telephone intercepts, or otherwise) in multiple languages.

[Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization] (TIDES) developing advanced language processing technology to enable English speakers to find and interpret critical information in multiple languages without requiring knowledge of those languages.

Other IAO projects not directly related to TIA include:

[Human Identification at a Distance] (HumanID) to develop automated biometric identification technologies to detect, recognize and identify humans at great distances.

[Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment] (WAE) focused on developing automated technology capable of identifying predictive indicators of terrorist activity or impeding attacks by examining individual and group behavior in broad environmental context and examining the motivation of specific terrorists.

[Futures Markets Applied to Prediction] (FutureMAP) was intended to harness collective intelligence by researching market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events. The intent was to explore the feasability of market-based trading mechanisms to predict political instability, threats to national security, and in other major events in the near future.

[Babylon] to develop rapid, two-way, natural language speech translation interfaces and platforms for the warfighter for use in field environments for force protection, refugee processing, and medical triage.

[Communicator] to develop and demonstrate “dialogue interaction” technology that enables warfighters to talk with computers, such that information will be accessible on the battlefield or in command centers without ever having to touch a keyboard

[Bio-Surveillance] to develop the necessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches.

The IAO logo

The former seal of the IAO was criticised by some for its masonic/Illuminati overtones.

The IAO caught the attention of many conspiracy theorists because of its use of the pseudo-Masonic eye-in-pyramid symbol in its original logo. That logo featured the eye of Providence from the Great Seal of the United States gazing at the Earth, and the Latin motto scientia est potentia, meaning "knowledge is power". In addition, "Iao" is another name for a gnostic supreme deity and sun-god, the Demiurge which is purportedly referred to in Masonic ritual.

As criticism of TIA grew in late 2002, the pyramid logo was removed from the official IAO webpage and replaced with a new logo. In response to questions about its removal, the IAO responded in February 2003 with a "[Statement regarding the meaning and use of the IAO logo]" published as an FAQ. The original descriptions of the IAO, TIA, and the biographies of senior staffers were also removed from the DARPA web site although they remain widely available on the Internet. For example, the [Original IAO Home Page].

Inverse surveillance

On November 27, 2002, San Francisco Weekly columnist Matt Smith decided to illustrate the perils of information proliferation to the IAO director, Adm. John Poindexter, by engaging in what some call inverse surveillance and published a column disclosing Poindexter's private home address and phone number, as well as those of Poindexter's next-door neighbors. This information quickly propagated through the Internet, and some protestors created [web sites] republishing this and other personal data.

Public criticism of the Information Awareness Office

Extensive criticism of the IAO in the traditional media and on the Internet has come from both the left and the right -- from civil libertarians and libertarians -- who believe that massive information aggregation and analysis technologies lead to a form of dataveillance that can threaten individual liberties. To some, these developments are seen as another step down the slippery slope to a totalitarian state. Others believe that development of these technologies is inevitable and that designing systems and policies to control their use is a more effective strategy than simple opposition that has resulted in research and development projects migrating into classified programs.

References

Copies of the original IAO web pages formerly available at http://www.darpa.mil/iao/ (June 12, 2002 - June 3, 2003) can be found at [Archive.org], Internet Archive

John Poindexter, [Overview of the Information Awareness Office] (Remarks as prepared for delivery by Dr. John Poindexter, Director, Information Awareness Office, at the DARPATech 2002 Conference) (August 2, 2002).

Information Awareness Office

Introduction

IAO research

The IAO logo

Inverse surveillance

Public criticism of the Information Awareness Office

References

External links

Media coverage

Academic articles

Critical views (established sources)

Critical views (less well recognized)

Proponent views

See also