Iran-Contra kingpin John Poindexter was retired from his Bush administration position at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, when details of his Total Information Awareness (TIA) data mining prototype scared the bejeebers out of even a quiescent Bush era Congress. Most people assumed that the program lived on under less aggressive monikers even after Poindexter’s precipitous departure, and some people speculated that the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping was in fact a data mining operation along Poindexteresque lines.
Today, the National Journal confirmed that speculation as fact: TIA found a home at the NSA.
A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Research under the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness program — which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States — was moved from the Pentagon’s research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.
The primary characteristic of data mining is that it indiscriminately gobbles up huge amounts of information before attempting to distill it into recognizable patterns. The most prominent recent example of data mining is the Pentagon’s defunct Able Danger program, which Pennsylvania Republican Curt Weldon and others claim identified Mohammed Atta as an al Qaeda operative and placed him in the US prior to the 911 hijackings. One of the reasons the data was destroyed, according to the man who deleted it, is that the operation inevitably gathered information on US citizens.
Able Danger worked primarily from publicly available data, but in the hands of the NSA, a data mining program would have access to the full range of NSA resources, including its monitoring of telephone and email communications. So it seems more than likely that the reason Bush bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is that the NSA was illegally gathering enormous amounts of information on US citizens.
Maybe the National Journal story will revive the moribund Congressional investigation into the NSA program. It’s certain to at least rekindle the debate, and the borderline hysteria over the Dubai ports deal could just tip the balance.
