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Information Awareness Office
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The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying information technology to counter transnational threats to national security.
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The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying information technology to counter transnational threats to national security. The IAO mission was to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness". Following public criticism that the development and deployment of these technologies could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003, although several of the projects run under IAO have continued under different funding.
Introduction
The IAO was established after Admiral John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan and SAIC executive Brian Hicks approached the US Department of Defense with the idea for an information awareness program after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001..
Poindexter and Hicks had previously worked together on intelligence-technology programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA agreed to host the program and appointed Poindexter to run it in 2002
The IAO began funding research and development of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program in February 2003 but renamed the program the Terrorism Information Awareness Program in May that year after an adverse media reaction to the program's implications for public surveillance. Although TIA was only one of several IAO projects, many critics and news reports conflated TIA with other related research projects of the IAO, with the result that TIA came in popular usage to stand for an entire subset of IAO programs.
The TIA program itself was the "systems-level" program of the IAO that intended to integrate information technologies into a prototype system to provide tools to better detect, classify, and identify potential foreign terrorists with the goal to increase the probability that authorized agencies of the United States could preempt adverse actions. As a systems-level program of programs, TIA's goal was the creation of a "counterterrorism information architecture" that integrated technologies from other IAO programs (and elsewhere, as appropriate). The TIA program was researching, developing, and integrating technologies to virtually aggregate data, to follow subject-oriented link analysis, to develop descriptive and predictive models through data mining or human hypothesis, and to apply such models to additional datasets to identify terrorists and terrorist groups.
Among the other IAO programs that were intended to provide TIA with component data aggregation and automated analysis technologies were the Genisys, Genisys Privacy Protection, Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery, and Scalable Social Network Analysis programs.
The first mention of the IAO in the mainstream media came from New York Times reporter John Markoff on February 13, 2002. Initial reports contained few details about the program. In the following months, as more information emerged about the scope of the TIA project, civil libertarians became concerned over what they saw as the potential for the development of an Orwellian mass surveillance system.
On August 2, 2002, Dr. Poindexter gave a speech at DARPAtech 2002 entitled "Overview of the Information Awareness Office" in which he described the TIA program.
On November 14, 2002 the New York Times published a column by William Safire in which he claimed "[TIA] has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans." Safire has been "credited" with triggering the anti-TIA movement.
In addition to the program itself, the involvement of Poindexter as director of the IAO also raised concerns among some, since he had been earlier convicted of lying to Congress and altering and destroying documents pertaining to the Iran-Contra Affair, although those convictions were later overturned on the grounds that the testimony used against him was protected.
On January 16, 2003, Senator Russ Feingold introduced legislation to suspend the activity of the IAO and the Total Information Awareness program pending a Congressional review of privacy issues involved. A similar measure introduced by Senator Ron Wyden would have prohibited the IAO from operating within the United States unless specifically authorized to do so by Congress, and would have shut the IAO down entirely 60 days after passage unless either the Pentagon prepared a report to Congress assessing the impact of IAO activities on individual privacy and civil liberties or the President certified the program's research as vital to national security interests. In February 2003, Congress passed legislation suspending activities of the IAO pending a Congressional report of the office's activities (Consolidated Appropriations Resolution, 2003, No.108–7, Division M, §111(b) [signed Feb. 20, 2003]).
In response to this legislation, DARPA provided Congress on May 20, 2003 with a report on its activities. In this report, IAO changed the name of the program to the Terrorism Information Awareness Program and emphasized that the program was not designed to compile dossiers on US citizens, but rather to research and develop the tools that would allow authorized agencies to gather information on terrorist networks. Despite the name change and these assurances, the critics continued to see the system as prone to potential misuse or abuse.
As a result House and Senate negotiators moved to prohibit further funding for the TIA program by adding provisions to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2004 (signed into law by President Bush on October 1, 2003). Further, the Joint Explanatory Statement included in the conference committee report specifically directed that the IAO as program manager for TIA be terminated immediately.
Components of TIA projects that continue to be developed
Despite the withdrawal of funding for the TIA and the closing of the IAO, the core of the project survived. Legislators included a classified annex to the Defense Appropriations Act that preserved funding for TIA's component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies.
TIA projects continued to be funded under classified annexes to Defense and Intelligence appropriation bills. However, the act also stipulated that the technologies only be used for military or foreign intelligence purposes against foreigners.
TIA's two core projects are now operated by Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) located among the 60-odd buildings of "Crypto City" at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD. ARDA itself has been shifted from the NSA to the Disruptive Technology Office (run by to the Director of National Intelligence). They are funded by National Foreign Intelligence Program for foreign counterterrorism intelligence purposes.
One technology, now codenamed "Baseball" is the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture to integrated all the TIA's information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools. Work on this project is conducted by SAIC through its Hicks & Associates, consulting arm that is run by former Defense and military officials and which had originally been awarded US$19 million IAO contract to build the prototype system in late 2002.
The other project has been re-designated "TopSail" (formerly Genoa II) and would provide IT tools to help anticipate and preempt terrorist attacks. SAIC has also been contracted to work on Topsail, including a US$3.7 million contract in 2005.
IAO research
IAO research was conducted along five major investigative paths: secure collaboration problem solving; structured discovery; link and group understanding; context aware visualization; and decision making with corporate memory.
Among the IAO projects that TIA was intended to integrate were:
- Genisys aimed at developing technologies for virtual data aggregation in order to support effective analysis across heterogeneous databases as well as unstructured public data sources, such as the World Wide Web.
- Genisys Privacy Protection technology to ensure personal privacy and protect sensitive intelligence sources and methods in the context of increasing use of data analysis for detecting, identifying and tracking terrorist threats. These technologies were intended to enable greater access to data for security reasons while protecting privacy by providing critical data to analysts while not allowing access to unauthorized information, focusing on anonymized transaction data and exposing identity only if evidence warrants and appropriate authorization is obtained for further investigation, and ensuring that any misuse of data can be detected and addressed.
- Genoa and Genoa II focused on providing advanced decision-support and collaboration tools to rapidly deal with and adjust to dynamic crisis management and allow for inter-agency collaboration in real-time.
- Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) development of technologies and tools for automated discovery, extraction and linking of sparse evidence contained in large amounts of classified and unclassified data sources
- Scalable Social Network Analysis aimed at developing techniques based on social network analysis for modeling the key characteristics of terrorist groups and discriminating these groups from other types of societal groups.
Among the IAO projects focused on language translation were:
- Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text (EARS) to develop automatic speech-to-text transcription technology whose output is substantially richer and much more accurate than previously possible. This program focused on translating spoken language (whether from broadcasts, telephone intercepts, or otherwise) in multiple languages.
- Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) developing advanced language processing technology to enable English speakers to find and interpret critical information in multiple languages without requiring knowledge of those languages.
Other IAO projects not directly related to TIA include:
- Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) to develop automated biometric identification technologies to detect, recognize and identify humans at great distances.
- Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (WAE) focused on developing automated technology capable of identifying predictive indicators of terrorist activity or impending attacks by examining individual and group behavior in broad environmental context and examining the motivation of specific terrorists.
- Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP) was intended to harness collective intelligence by researching market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events. The intent was to explore the feasibility of market-based trading mechanisms to predict political instability, threats to national security, and other major events in the near future.
- Babylon to develop rapid, two-way, natural language speech translation interfaces and platforms for the warfighter for use in field environments for force protection, refugee processing, and medical triage.
- Communicator to develop and demonstrate "dialogue interaction" technology that enables warfighters to talk with computers, such that information will be accessible on the battlefield or in command centers without ever having to touch a keyboard
- Bio-Surveillance to develop the necessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches.
The IAO seal
The IAO uses the eye of Providence from the Great Seal of the United States gazing at the Earth as logo, and the Latin motto , meaning "knowledge is power". The pyramid has thirteen layers, the same of that on the US 1-dollar bill.
As criticism of TIA grew in late 2002, the pyramid logo was removed from the official IAO webpage and replaced with a new logo. In response to questions about its removal, the IAO responded in February 2003 with a "Statement regarding the meaning and use of the IAO logo" published as a FAQ. The original descriptions of the IAO, TIA, and the biographies of senior staffers were also removed from the DARPA web site although they remain widely available on the Internet.
Concerns and criticism
Extensive criticism of the IAO in the traditional media and on the Internet has come from both the left and the right—from civil libertarians and libertarians—who believe that massive information aggregation and analysis technologies are a grave threat to privacy and civil liberties. Many fear that allowing a government to monitor all communications, and map social networks will give them the ability to target dissenters or political threats. This concern is not unfounded -- there are several precedents, for example, COINTELPRO and other government programs that targeted peaceful political activists in the U.S. The IAO would greatly enhance their ability to identify, track, infiltrate, and target such groups. Such a system of surveillance is a necessary component of a strong totalitarian state.
Proponents believe that development of these technologies is inevitable and that designing systems and policies to control their use is a more effective strategy than simple opposition that has resulted in research and development projects migrating into classified programs.
On November 27, 2002, San Francisco Weekly columnist Matt Smith decided to illustrate the perils of information proliferation to the IAO director, Adm. John Poindexter, by disclosing Poindexter's private home address and phone number, as well as those of Poindexter's next-door neighbors. This information quickly propagated through the Internet, and some protesters created web sites republishing this and other personal data.
Conspiracy theories
The IAO's originally adopted logo, particularly the eye and pyramid, has long been associated with the symbolism of the Illuminati in various conspiracy theories surrounding the alleged New World Order. Interestingly the motto, scientia potentia est, was first stated by Sir Francis Bacon, whose connection to various secret societies, particularly the Freemasons, has often been suggested and discussed. Some suggestions even go as far to say he was once a leader within the Freemasons.
Connections between the IAO and the popular social networking site Facebook have been also suggested as a hidden continuation of the program's intention to collect information on citizens. Theorists point out that the privacy policy of Facebook has raised many concerns about possible data-mining and that the relationships of persons funding Facebook shows close ties to peoples previously involved in the IAO. A short released onto the internet called: "Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook" - talks of these connections calling for public awareness on the issue and discussing implications.
See also
Further reading
- Copies of the original IAO web pages formerly available at http://www.darpa.mil/iao/ (June 12, 2002–June 3, 2003) can be found at , Internet Archive
- John Poindexter, (Remarks as prepared for delivery by Dr. John Poindexter, Director, Information Awareness Office, at the DARPATech 2002 Conference) (August 2, 2002).
External links
Media coverage
Academic articles
Critical views (established sources)
Critical views (less well recognized)
Proponent views
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