Briefs

By Drew Clark, National Journal's Technology Daily, Nov 20, 2003

Congress' decision to terminate funding for the Defense Department's Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA) program has cast a pall over other, potentially useful data-mining applications, Defense officials told their Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee (TAPAC) on Thursday.

One halted program involves attempts to identify suicide bombers attacking U.S. interests overseas. Deputy Defense Undersecretary Sue Payton said such restrictions were "absolutely" a significant impediment in failing to prevent Thursday's suicide bombing in Istanbul, Turkey.

Another top official shed light on the airline-passenger profiling system that an Army contractor developed with personal data from JetBlue Airways. Using an hypothesis developed by studying the data, the project identified terrorists with 83 percent accuracy, said Thomas Killion, the Army's chief scientist and acting deputy assistant secretary for research and technology.

But as a result of privacy concerns raised by the use of the data without customer consent, the Army's inspector general is investigating the matter, Killion said. "We are not pursuing additional applications partly because of privacy" concerns, he said in an interview.

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