Criticism calls program identifying terrorist threats into question

By Jonathan York (Daily Texan Staff)
January 31, 2003

Editor's note: This is part of an occasional series exploring defense research in the UT System.

The UT System is developing components of the U.S. Department of Defense's Total Information Awareness project, a nationwide database for recognizing terrorist threats that has drawn criticism from Congress and the public.

Raymond Mooney, a computer sciences professor, has worked with three University of Wisconsin faculty members since fall of 2001 on one component - called "Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery." A separate team from UT-Arlington studied the same topic.

Work on the Austin and Arlington projects has been unclassified and conducted on the schools' campuses. Funds came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which helped develop the Internet.

UT-Dallas' focus is another component, called "Human Identification at a Distance." According to DARPA, the project would develop software to recognize individuals from 500 feet away. Few details were available about the UT-Dallas project, but Jan Walker, a DARPA spokeswoman, said the institution had received just under $500,000 by April 2001.

Total Information Awareness is DARPA's name for a system that would supposedly divine terroristic threats from the mass of information the federal government can obtain about its citizens: Medical records. Drivers license registrations. Airline ticket purchases. Matching transactions with current events. The database could discern the setup for a possible attack.

The database itself will be born from the slow integration of several projects, including those in which the UT System is now involved, said Walker. For instance, UT researchers in Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery are working with mock data, attempting to teach software to recognize dangerous patterns.

"One of the things we're looking at is called a social network. You can think of it as a graph of interconnections," said Lawrence Holder, a UT-Arlington computer sciences professor and project researcher. "If one person knows one person, there's a link. You kind of build up those links over time."

DARPA gave UT-Arlington a two-year, $375,000 grant, paid in three installments, Holder said. The $100,000 final payment came this month.

Mooney, of Austin, and the Wisconsin team received slightly less than $1 million for a three-year grant, said Jude Shavlik, a University of Wisconsin professor. Mooney, who knew Shavlik at the University of Illinois, would not comment on the research.

Both research teams say information about the project is open to the public. After all, they have published articles about their research to date. A UT-Arlington Web site, http://ailab.uta.edu/subdue, makes UT-Arlington's link discovery software available for download.

But a wall of secrecy stands between university researchers and some specifics of Total Information Awareness. Documents posted on DARPA's Web site state the defense agency intends "to team with one or more U.S. intelligence agencies, and may desire that proposers selected for award would perform in collaboration with those agencies."

According to the documents, "Key performers of prospective awardees whose activities would involve collaboration with the intelligence community must hold a current top secret Department of Defense clearance and be approved for access to sensitive compartmentalized information."

Holder confronts governmental secrecy in the course of his duties. The analysis of his research takes place in a secure environment.

DARPA calls Total Information Awareness a "vision." Some in Congress, the press and the public have called it less benign names. Most notably, the U.S. Senate passed a bill with an amendment last week that would stall the project altogether unless the defense department presents a report assessing the potential loss of privacy rights.

"It is really one of the most ambitious and far-reaching surveillance programs ever proposed, and its concept would really transform a lot of the protections and the standards that we operate under," said Mihir Kshirsagar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which sued DARPA for detailed information about contracts for the project.

Academic researchers are using mock sets of data. But even they have misgivings.

"Sure, [the privacy concerns] give me reason for pause," Holder said. "Any person who works with the Total Information System, if not constrained in what they can access, can particularly abuse that power."

Steven Kornguth, a UT biodefense researcher, said DARPA's information gathering project "is a great idea, to do the testing, to do the research to see if it's possible how we can merge this information.

"But I think you need to have oversight by Congress and by the public."