Publications

WIRED (Dec 2, 2002) article "Total Info System Totally Touchy" discusses the Total Information Awareness system.

The Total Information Awareness System and related efforts received $137 million in government funding for the 2003 fiscal year.

Critics say looking for terrorists by rooting around in private, commercial databases of Americans' personal information violates the Fourth Amendment -- not to mention citizens' privacy. Some in the industry even refuse to work on the project on ethical grounds.

"Terrorists operate in shadowy networks," said Pentagon spokeswoman Jan Walker. "People have to move and plan before committing a terrorist act. Our hypothesis is their planning process has a signature."

Project coordinators will start by creating a database of fake transactions mixed with real intelligence data and simulated terrorist "clues." Then they will test the ability of pattern-matching algorithms and data-mining tools to spot the terrorist signatures.

"The proposal is do-able and feasible, but the idea of making it into a single window onto disparate information and integrating it on a massive scale is the real challenge," said Chris Sherman, associate editor of Search Engine Watch.

Sherman pointed to existing technologies such as software from i2 that the Treasury uses to track financial crimes, as an example of technology that hunts for hidden data patterns.

Others in the industry question the system's feasibility.

"The kind of things they are looking for are hard to find," said Herb Edelstein, president of data-mining company Two Crows. "Terrorism is an adaptive problem. It's pretty unlikely the next terrorist attack will be people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.

Here is full story from WIRED.