Briefs

Associated Press (02/23/04); Sniffen, Michael J.

The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program may have been killed by congressional decree, but key elements of the program have survived at other intelligence agencies, according to congressional, federal, and research officials. TIA's goal was to employ data-mining to sift through public and private databases to track terrorists, which stirred up fears that the program would be used to spy on millions of innocent Americans.

Congressional officials have not disclosed which TIA programs were eliminated and which were retained, but insiders report that TIA's Evidence and Extraction and Link Discovery projects, collectively encompassing 18 data-mining initiatives, are among the surviving components. The continuance of certain projects originally falling under the auspices of TIA has led Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists to conclude that Congress' decision to disband TIA was nothing more than "a shell game."

Despite the death of TIA, Capitol Hill is still paying for the development of software designed to collect foreign intelligence on terrorists: a $64 million research program run by the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), which has employed some of the same researchers as TIA, was left untouched by Congress. The goal of ARDA's "Novel Intelligence from Massive Data" effort is to develop software that can cull information from petabytes of data, and ARDA says that it complies with privacy laws. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is pressuring the executive branch to disclose details of its data-mining projects to Congress, and recently urged a Pentagon advisory panel to propose laws on reviewing data.

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