[osint] TIA Offices Discovered - Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans

[R. A. Hettinga]

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To:
From: "Tefft, Bruce" <Bruce_Tefft at sra.com>
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Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 09:46:29 -0400
Subject: [osint] TIA Offices Discovered - Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans
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Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7
By  TERESA HAMPTON & DOUG THOMPSON
Jun 7, 2004,  00:34

Customers of the Bank of America branch at 3625 Fairfax Drive in Arlington,
Virginia, often wonder about the Arlington police car that is always parked
in front of the building in the next block.

 They also can©–t help but notice the two armed guards from the private
Cantwell Security Service who patrol the street in front of the building and
eye each passerby warily.

©¯What©–s going on across the street?©— one woman asked while waiting in line
to deposit her paycheck last Friday.

©¯Not sure,©— said the man ahead of her in line. ©¯Something to do with the
government. The police cars and guards have been there since shortly after
9-11.©—

©¯Oh,©— she said. ©¯No matter.©—

Actually, if the woman knew what was happening inside the nondescript office
building at 3701 Fairfax Drive, she might think it really does matter
because the building houses the Pentagon©–s Defense Advanced Research Project
Agency©–s Total Information Awareness Program, the ©¯big brother©— program
Congress thought it killed.

When the woman in line deposited her paycheck at the Bank of America branch,
a record of that deposit showed up immediately in the computer databanks in
the office across the street, just as financial, travel and other personal
transactions of virtually every American do millions of time every minute.

Despite Congressional action cutting funding, and the resignation of the
program©–s controversial director, retired admiral John Poindexter, DARPA©–s
TIA program is alive and well and prying into the personal business of
Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

©¯When Congress cut the funding, the Pentagon  with administration approval
 simply moved the program into a ‘black bag©– account,©— says a security
consultant who worked on the DARPA project.  ©¯Black bag programs don©–t
require Congressional approval and are exempt from traditional oversight.©—

DARPA also hired private contractors to fill many of the roles in the
program, which helped evade detection by Congressional auditors. Using a
private security firm like Cantwell, instead of the Federal Protective
Service, helped keep TIA off the radar screen.

DARPA moved into the Arlington County building shortly after the September
11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and established
the TIA project under the USA Patriot Act and a number of executive orders
from President George W. Bush.

TIA©–s mission was to build a giant computer database with real time access
to bank records, credit card companies, airlines and other travel companies,
credit bureaus and other data banks to monitor, in real time, the financial
transactions and travel of Americans and foreign citizens with accounts at
the institutions.

Under provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the banks and other companies were
forced to allow DARPA to access their files, a move normally considered an
invasion of privacy.

When news of TIA first surfaced in 2002, along with the appointment of
Poindexter, a key-figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, as director, citizens©–
watchdog groups and some members of Congress took a second look.  The uproar
that followed led to the resignation of Poindexter, who had lied to Congress
during the Iran-Contra investigation, and the elimination of funding for
TIA.

But Congress left the door open by supplying DARPA with research funding to
develop data mining alternatives to TIA. Instead, the Bush administration
instructed the Pentagon to move TIA into the convert area of black bag
operations and Congress was cut out of the loop.

Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a program manager for DARPA, defends TIA as a necessary
sacrifice in the war on terrorism.

©¯Americans must trade some privacy for security,©— he says. ©¯Three thousand
people died on 9/11. When you consider the potential effect of a terrorist
attack against the privacy of an entire population, there has to be some
trade-off.©—

The trade off means virtually every financial transaction of every American
is now recorded and monitored by the federal government. Any bank
transaction, all credit card charges plus phone records, credit reports,
travel and even health records are captured in real time by the DARPA
computers.

©¯Basically, TIA builds a profile of every American who has a bank account,
uses credit cards and has a credit record,©— says security expert Allen
Banks. ©¯The profile establishes norms based on the person©–s spending and
travel habits. Then the system looks for patterns that break from the norms,
such of purchases of materials that are considered likely for terrorist
activity, travel to specific areas or a change in spending habits.©—

Patterns that fit pre-defined criteria result in an investigative alert and
the individual becomes a ©¯person of interest©— who is referred to the
Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, Banks says.

Such data mining is also called ©¯database profiling©— and is prohibited under
Fourth Amendment©–s guarantee against invasion of privacy says Barry
Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American
Civil Liberties Union.

Steinhardt points out the information is already being used to create ©¯no
fly©— lists of people who are thought to be a danger but that safeguards are
not in place to insure the accuracy of the information.

©¯Once you get on a ‘no-fly©– list, how do you get off it?©— Steinhardt asks.

Missouri Congressman William Clay, ranking minority member of the House
Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on Technology, Information
Policy, and Intergovernmental Relations, worries that DARPA is skirting the
law by letting private contractors handle the data mining.

"The agencies involved in data mining are trying to skirt the Privacy Act by
claiming that they hold no data," said Clay. Instead, they use private
companies to maintain and sift through the data, he said.

"Technically, that gets them out from under the Privacy Act," he said.
"Ethically, it does not."

When the Senate voted in 2003 to cut funding for TIA, Senators like Ron
Wyden of Oregon thought they had put a stop to the problem.

"This makes it clear that Congress wants to make sure there is no snooping
on law-abiding Americans," Wyden said after the vote.

But it didn©–t. The Bush Administration, already recognized as one of the
most secretive Presidencies in modern times, simply put the program under
wraps and let it continue.

When Congress voted to cut the funded, the operation at 3701 Fairfax Drive
should have shut down and Arlington County should have returned the officers
assigned there to normal duty.  However, the officers remained in place and
additional security was added to the detail.

According to construction records on file in the Arlington County building
and zoning office, more than 20 high-speed data lines have been installed at
the location in the last 18 months. Microwave data antennas are also
installed on the roof.

Pentagon spokesmen refuse to discuss what is happening in the building,
citing "national security" as the reason.

When quized about TIA earlier, DARPA officials insist they have safeguards
to prevent abuses but the record suggests otherwise.

©¯Given the military's legacy of privacy abuses, such vague assurances are
cold comfort,©— says Gene Healy, senior editor of the CATO Institute in
Washington.

©¯During World War I, concerns about German saboteurs led to unrestrained
domestic spying by U.S. Army intelligence operatives,©— says Healy. ©¯Army
spies were given free reign to gather information on potential subversives,
and were often empowered to make arrests as special police officers.
Occasionally, they carried false identification as employees of public
utilities to allow them, as the chief intelligence officer for the Western
Department put it, ‘to enter offices or residences of suspects gracefully,
and thereby obtain data.©–©—

 In her book Army Surveillance in America, historian Joan M. Jensen noted,
©¯What began as a system to protect the government from enemy agents became a
vast surveillance system to watch civilians who violated no law but who
objected to wartime policies or to the war itself.©—

The Army©–s recent debacle with treatment of Iraqi prisoners also suggests
the American military system lacks either the ability or the restraint to
police itself.

©¯There's a long and troubling history of military surveillance in this
country,©— Healy adds. ©¯That history suggests that we should loathe allowing
the Pentagon access to our personal information.©—

While TIA allows the government to snoop on American citizens, experts in
the data mining field say it won©–t help fight terrorism.

"Terrorism is an adaptive problem,©— says Herb Edelstein, president of
data-mining company Two Crows.  ©¯It's pretty unlikely the next terrorist
attack will be people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.©—

Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the
21st Century, agrees.

©¯Data mining is good for the purpose of increasing sales and figuring out
where to place products in stores,©— he says. ©¯This is very different from
figuring out if these products are going to be used for terrorist
activities.©—

Other experts say the chances for mistakes are huge.

©¯With meaningful pattern recognition, the order of magnitude of errors from
inferences is huge, something like ten to the third (power),©— says Paul
Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and the chairman of information
mapping software company Groxis. ©¯There would be an incalculable expense to
monitor a thousand wrong hits for one correct inference.©—

DARPA tried to interest Groxis in becoming part of the TIA project but the
company declined, saying the project was neither feasible nor ethical. 
Hawken says he knows people with the National Security Agency who refused to
work on TIA because of ethical concerns.

The dangers of TIA have created a coalition of strange bedfellows. The
American Civil Liberties Union has teamed up with conservative Phyllis
Schlafly©–s Eagle Forum and even the Heritage Foundation to fight not only
TIA but other abuses of Constitutional rights under the USA Patriot Act.
Even former member of Congress Bob Barr, a conservative firebrand, has
joined the effort.

Yet even with all this attention, TIA still exists and still watches
Americans 24/7 from the office building on Fairfax Drive in Arlington.
Although employees who work in the building are supposed to keep their
presence there a secret, they regularly sport their DARPA id badges around
their necks when eating at restaurants near the building. The straps
attached to the badges are printed with ©¯DARPA©— in large letters.

©¯Yeah, they©–re the spooks who work in the building over there,©— says Ernie,
the counterman at a deli near 3701 Fairfax Drive. ©¯If this is how they keep
secrets, I guess we should really be worried.©—


© Copyright  2004 by Capitol Hill Blue





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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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