Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: November 9, 2002
The Pentagon is constructing a computer system
that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal
information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe —
including the United States.
As the director of the effort, Vice
Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents
and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law
enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet
mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and
travel documents, without a search warrant.
Historically, military
and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans
without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the
former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has
argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and
mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.
Admiral
Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches
but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to
"break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government
databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for
hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.
"We must become much more efficient and more
clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from
the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis,
convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options," he said in a
speech in California earlier this year.
Admiral Poindexter quietly
returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of
Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new
surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
In
order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new
legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the
Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before
Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which
was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private
information.
The possibility that the system might be deployed
domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial
transactions worries civil liberties proponents.
"This could be
the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," said Marc Rotenberg,
director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington "The
vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the
agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of
the American public."
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has
been briefed on the project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a
lunch to discuss it, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
"As part
of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a variety of
organizations, to include the law enforcement community," a Pentagon
spokeswoman said.
An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition
that he not be identified, said the bureau had had preliminary
discussions with the Pentagon about the project but that no final
decision had been made about what information the F.B.I. might add to
the system.
A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland
Security, Gordon Johndroe, said officials in the office were not
familiar with the computer project and he declined to discuss concerns
raised by the project's critics without knowing more about it.
He
referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials said
they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too were
not familiar enough with the project.
Some members of a panel of
computer scientists and policy experts who were asked by the Pentagon to
review the privacy implications this summer said terrorists might find
ways to avoid detection and that the system might be easily abused.
"A
lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the
potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this
administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer
scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing
Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."
Other
technology policy experts dispute that assessment and support Admiral
Poindexter's position that linking of databases is necessary to track
potential enemies operating inside the United States.
"They're
conceptualizing the problem in the way we've suggested it needs to be
understood," said Philip Zelikow, a historian who is executive director
of the Markle Foundation task force on National Security in the
Information Age. "They have a pretty good vision of the need to make the
tradeoffs in favor of more sharing and openness."
On Wednesday
morning, the panel reported its findings to Dr. Tony Tether, the
director of the defense research agency, urging development of
technologies to protect privacy as well as surveillance, according to
several people who attended the meeting.
If deployed, civil
libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a
surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon
learn how to avoid detection in any case.
The new system will rely
on a set of computer-based pattern recognition techniques known as
"data mining," a set of statistical techniques used by scientists as
well as by marketers searching for potential customers.
The system
would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and view
information from databases, pursue links between individuals and groups,
respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, all
from their individual computers.
The project calls for the
development of a prototype based on test data that would be deployed at
the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va.
Officials would not say when the system would be put into operation.
The
system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the
government to lash together both commercial and government data to hunt
for patterns of terrorist activities.
"What we are doing is
developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the
ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign
terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to
take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts,"
said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.
Before
taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was
convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as a
contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral Poindexter's
conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he
had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the
case.
