NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Oct 1, 2003

"DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research and Development Agency, which oversaw the project) was caught in a 'perfect storm' of public opinion," said David Jensen, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"Like Washington, D.C., with Hurricane Isabel it was just in the wrong place," he concluded.

"We are not ... searching credit card histories or library records or gun ownership records or building files or dossiers on any U.S. citizens, or developing a 'Big Brother' system to invade the privacy of anyone," added Brian Sharkey, a former deputy director of DARPA now working with a private sector defense consultancy.

Jensen and Sharkey were among a group of research contractors -- many of whose projects face the axe under a provision in the defense appropriations bill passed by Congress last week -- who gave evidence to a two-day hearing of a special Defense Department panel.

Not all concurred with Jensen's views, however. Some said that DARPA had erred in not emphasizing privacy issues sufficiently.

The panel was set up by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after the Total Information Awareness project attracted a storm of public controversy and protests from senior lawmakers. TIA -- it was quickly renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness project -- was headed up by disgraced former national security adviser, retired Adm. John Poindexter, who had been convicted of lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal and then pardoned.

Poindexter resigned last month after a second storm was kicked up over plans for an Internet-based market aiming to predict future terrorist events by getting investors to bet on the likelihood of their occurrence.

TIA sought techniques for analyzing patterns in large databases to try to catch potential terrorists or detect terrorist activity. Critics said that there was an unacceptable risk to privacy from looking for patterns in information gleaned by combining data from commercial databases -- like those of credit agencies -- with data from the government's own -- like immigration, Social Security or Department of Motor Vehicles records.

But this kind of analysis, known as data aggregation and data mining, was defended by all of the scientists before the panel as a crucial tool in the war on terror.

'A Form of Blindness'

"If you don't aggregate (data), you suffer from a form of blindness," said Jeff Jonas, a software developer who has worked with Las Vegas casinos to develop ways of detecting professional cheats by analyzing different sets of records.

Some of the scientists suggested that DARPA had in some ways brought its fate on itself by not taking sufficient account of privacy concerns initially.

"We had integrated privacy concerns into our work from even before Day One -- it was on the design board of the pilot project," Latanya Sweeney of Carnegie Mellon University told United Press International after the hearing. Her project, which aims to trawl medical data looking for evidence of bioterrorism, was one of a handful specifically excluded from closure by the appropriations bill.

Some other TIA projects may also be spared -- moved to different parts of the Defense Department. These projects are described in a classified annex to the appropriations bill and it could not be learned which they were.

Sweeney -- whose project was launched in 2000 -- pointed out that prior to Sept. 11, the Defense Department was acutely conscious of the potential controversy that might attach to them doing surveillance on U.S. citizens. "They didn't want to find themselves on the front page of The New York Times," she said.

But after Sept. 11, attitudes in the Pentagon changed.

"The group that was developing these (other) concepts," she said, in an apparent reference to Poindexter's leadership, "didn't weigh privacy the same as the group who started the bioterrorism work."

She said that only changing this attitude and integrating privacy concerns into the research process, not closing down any particular program, could protect citizens' rights.

"Pulling the plug (on TIA) isn't going to stop this (research)," she said. "We have to move law and policy onto the design board."

The scientists were adamant that DARPA had received an unjustly bad rap and that none of their work threatened privacy. Each presentation focused on the different ways that the various projects they were working on protected the anonymity of the data. They appeared to have convinced at least one of the panelists.

Griffin Bell, U.S. attorney general under President Carter, wondered why it wasn't possible "to get the public to believe what I think is true, which is that everything is anonymous until you've got probable cause."

Despite Sharkey's insistence that his project -- which aimed at assisting collaboration and information sharing among agencies gathering foreign intelligence -- was no threat to the rights of U.S. citizens he was nevertheless gloomy about its prospects.

"It looks pretty ominous," he told the panel, "I'm assuming that we are killed."

He later told UPI he was "greatly disappointed. I believe what we're doing is very important for the country ... I feel like we've done a very good job."

Copyright 2003 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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