http://www.abqtrib.com/albq/nw_natio...459567,00.html

The U.S. government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism.

But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.

"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about. It's one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with."

The core of this effort is a little-known system called ADVISE - Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement. Only a few public documents mention it.

ADVISE is a research and development program within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, part of its three-year-old Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment program. The program received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.

Homeland Security officials are circumspect when talking about ADVISE.

"I've heard of it," says Peter Sand, director of privacy technology for the department. "I don't know the actual status right now. But if it's a system that's been discussed, then it's something we're involved in at some level."

A major part of ADVISE involves data mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns.

If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit card issuers use data mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity.

What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records, for example, or CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against U.S. intelligence and law enforcement records.

The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 Department of Homeland Security conference in Alexandria, Va.

The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high -- roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.

But ADVISE and related Homeland Secuirtytechnologies aim to do much more, said Joseph Kielman, manager of the Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment program.

The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illuminate their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.

For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.

At least a few pieces of ADVISE are already operational. Consider Starlight, which, along with other "visualization" software tools, can give human analysts a graphical view of data.

Viewing data in this way could reveal patterns not obvious in text or number form. Understanding the relationships among people, organizations, places and things - using social behavior analysis and other techniques - is essential to going beyond mere data mining to comprehensive "knowledge discovery in databases," Kielman wrote in his November report.

He declined to be interviewed for this article.

Starlight has already helped foil some terror plots, said Jim Thomas, one of its developers and director of the government's new National Visualization Analytics Center in Richland, Wash.

He said he can't elaborate because the cases are classified. But "there's no question that the technology we've invented here at the lab has been used to protect our freedoms - and that's pretty cool."

As envisioned, ADVISE and its analytical tools would be used by other agencies to look for terrorists.

"All federal, state, local and private-sector security entities will be able to share and collaborate in real time with distributed data warehouses that will provide full support for analysis and action" for the ADVISE system, the 2004 workshop report says.

Yet the scope of ADVISE - its stage of development, cost, and most other details - is so obscure that critics say it poses a major privacy challenge.

"We just don't know enough about this technology, how it works, or what it is used for," said Marcia Hofmann of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.

"It matters to a lot of people that these programs and software exist. We don't really know to what extent the government is mining personal data."

Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the program a year later.

ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."
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I used to visualize a bunch of surveillance vans going around tapping phone lines, spying on people and so on, like on Law and Order, etc. But, this seems to be a huge work in progress that has been going on for quite a while - way before the Bush administration - and will continue to grow.

My question would be: Will we be able to trust that information about the normal activities of individual citizens be sifted out when it is deemed to be 'non-essential'? And if so, who will determine what information will be discarded, and when?

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http://www.freedomswatch.org/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx

When religion ruled the world...wasn't that the Dark Ages?

It's Big Brother's data base.

ADVISE - Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement.

"three-year-old Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment program."

"At least a few pieces of ADVISE are already operational. Consider Starlight, which, along with other "visualization" software tools, can give human analysts a graphical view of data."

Ain't Starlight a cool name for a piece of software! Naming it after an inferred sniper scope.

It's (Total Information Awareness) TIA and John Poindexter all over again.

I wonder if the boys on the hill have approved this as a separate program and what the funding is.

http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,54342,00.html

http://www.cato.org/dailys/01-20-03.html

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56860,00.html

http://www.warblogging.com/tia/poindexter.php

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Classic American liberal