Information Awareness Office seal

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. Information Awareness Office logo; public domain from http://www. ... Information Awareness Office logo; public domain from http://www. ... The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ... Department of Defense redirects here. ... Security measures taken to protect the Houses of Parliament in London, England. ... The ASCII codes for the word Wikipedia represented in binary, the numeral system most commonly used for encoding computer information. ... Asymmetric warfare originally referred to war between two or more actors or groups whose relative power differs significantly. ... A closed-circuit television camera. ... Type Bicameral Houses Senate House of Representatives President of the Senate President pro tempore Dick Cheney, (R) since January 20, 2001 Robert C. Byrd, (D) since January 4, 2007 Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, (D) since January 4, 2007 Members 535 plus 4 Delegates and 1 Resident Commissioner Political...

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 Defence with the idea for an information awareness program after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.^[1]. Rear Admiral John Poindexter USN (Ret. ... The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, commonly referred to as the National Security Advisor, serves as the chief advisor to the President of the United States on national security issues. ... Reagan redirects here. ... The acronym SAIC can stand for: Science Applications International Corporation School of the Art Institute of Chicago Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation Special Agent in Charge, acronym used by some U.S. Federal agencies (F.B.I., etc. ... The United States Department of Defense, abbreviated DoD or DOD and sometimes called the Defense Department, is a civilian Cabinet organization of the United States government. ... The date that commonly refers to the attacks on United States citizens on September 11, 2001 (see the September 11, 2001 Attacks). ...

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 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ...

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.^[2] 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. The New York Times is an internationally known daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. ... John Markoff (born October 24, 1949) is an American writer and journalist. ... A civil libertarian is one who is actively concerned with the protection of individual civil liberties and civil rights. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... A closed-circuit television camera. ...

On August 2 2002, Dr. Poindexter gave a speech at DARPAtech 2002 entitled "Overview of the Information Awareness Office"^[3] 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."^[4] Safire has been "credited" with triggering the anti-TIA movement.^[5]

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 technicality that the testimony used against him was protected. The Iran-Contra Affair was a political scandal occurring in 1987 as a result of earlier events during the Reagan administration in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran, an avowed enemy, and illegally used the profits to continue funding anti-Communist rebels, the Contras, in Nicaragua. ...

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.^[6] 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 of 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]). is the 16th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Russell Dana Russ Feingold (born March 2, 1953) is an American politician from the U.S. state of Wisconsin. ... Ronald Lee Wyden (born May 3, 1949) to German American parents, is Oregons senior United States Senator. ...

In response to this legislation, DARPA provided Congress on May 20, 2003 with a report on its activities.^[7] 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. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ...

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^[8] (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.^[9]

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.^[10] 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.^[11]

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. The Disruptive Technology Office, or DTO, is a funding agency within the United States Intelligence Community. ... The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is the United States government official subject to the authority, direction and control of the President of the United States who is responsible under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 for: Serving as the principal adviser to the President of the...

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.^[12] The acronym SAIC can stand for: Science Applications International Corporation School of the Art Institute of Chicago Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation Special Agent in Charge, acronym used by some U.S. Federal agencies (F.B.I., etc. ...

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.^[13]

• 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.^[14][15]

• 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^[16]

• 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.^[13]

• 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.^[17]

Other IAO projects not directly related to TIA include: Speech recognition technologies allow computers equipped with a source of sound input, such as a microphone, to interpret human speech, e. ...

• Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) to develop automated biometric identification technologies to detect, recognize and identify humans at great distances.^[18]

• 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.^[19]

• 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.^[20]

• 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.^[21]

• 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^[22]

• 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.^[23]

The IAO seal

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 scientia est potentia, meaning "knowledge is power". The pyramid has 13 steps, the same of that on the US 1 dollar bill. Information Awareness Office logo; public domain from http://www. ... Information Awareness Office logo; public domain from http://www. ... This article does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Obverse The Great Seal of the United States is used to authenticate certain documents issued by the United States government. ... This article is about Earth as a planet. ... For other uses, see Latin (disambiguation). ... For the US one-dollar coin, see United States dollar coin. ...

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.^[24] 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.^[25]

Public criticism of the Information Awareness Office

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 lead to a form of dataveillance that can threaten individual liberties. To some, these developments are seen as another step down the slippery slope to a totalitarian state. Others 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. Surveillance cameras A helicopter flying over Lille, France, watching for possible rioting after the 2007 presidential election Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior. ... In debate or rhetoric, the slippery slope is an argument for the likelihood of one event or trend given another. ... Forms of government Part of the Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Totalitarianism is a term employed by some scientists, especially those in the field of comparative politics, to describe modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior. ...

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.^[26] is the 331st day of the year (332nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Also see: 2002 (number). ...

References

1. ^ TIA Lives On, National Journal, 23 February 2006, retrieved 27 July 2007
2. ^ http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20A11F734580C708DDDAB0894DA404482
3. ^ Overview of the Information Awareness Office
4. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html
5. ^ Big Brother ...
6. ^ http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:s.00188:
7. ^ http://www.information-retrieval.info/docs/tia-exec-summ_20may2003.pdf
8. ^ Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2004, Pub. L. No. 108–87, § 8131, 117 Stat. 1054, 1102 (2003)
9. ^ 149 Cong. Rec. H8755—H8771 (Sept. 24, 2003)
10. ^ [Wanted: Competent Big Brothers http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm], Newsweek, 8 February 2006, retrieved 27 July 2007
11. ^ The Total Information Awareness Project Lives On, Technology Review, 26 April 2006, retrieved 27 July 2007
12. ^ TIA Lives On, National Journal, 23 February 2006, retrieved 27 July 2007
13. ^ ^{a b} http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/Genisys.htm
14. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/Genoa.htm
15. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/GenoaII.htm
16. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/EELD.htm
17. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/TIDES.htm
18. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/HID.htm
19. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/WAE.htm
20. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/FutureMap.htm
21. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/Babylon.htm
22. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/Communicator.htm
23. ^ http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/BSS.htm
24. ^ Statement regarding the meaning and use of the IAO logo
25. ^ For example, the Original IAO Home Page
26. ^ http://sfweekly.com/2002-11-27/news/calling-all-yahoos/

• 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 Archive.org, Internet Archive

• John Poindexter, Overview of the Information Awareness Office (Remarks as prepared for delivery by Dr. John Poindexter, Director, Information Awareness Office, at the DARPATech 2002 Conference) (August 2, 2002).

The logo of Internet Archive The Internet Archive (IA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources. ...

See also

• Combat Zones That See, or CTS, a project to link up all security cameras citywide and "track everything that moves".
• Echelon, NSA worldwide digital interception program
• Carnivore, FBI US digital interception program
• Intellipedia, a collection of wikis used by the U.S. intelligence community to "connect the dots" between pieces of intelligence
• Government Information Awareness "acts as a framework for US citizens to construct and analyze a comprehensive database on our government".
• Institutional memory
• LifeLog, "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities."
• Magic Lantern (software), the FBI's keystroke logging tool
• Mass surveillance
• Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange
• Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act UK Legal provision for digital interception
• Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations

Combat Zones That See, or CTS, is a project of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency whose goal is to track everything that moves in a city by linking up a massive network of surveillance cameras to a centralized computer system. ... This article is about the Signals Intelligence capability. ... Carnivore is a name given to a system implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is analogous to wiretapping except in this case, e-mail and other communications are being tapped instead of telephone conversations. ... Intellipedia/ODNI Logo Intellipedia is a series of three wikis that runs on JWICS, SIPRNet, and Intelink-U. They are used by the 16 agencies that comprise the United States intelligence community. ... The Open Government Information Awareness was a project at MIT to provide US citizens with software tools to construct a database on the US government. ... Insititutional Memory is episode 153 of The West Wing. ... LifeLog was a project of the Information Processing Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. ... This article is about ontology in philosophy. ... Magic Lantern is a keystroke logging program developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ... A closed-circuit television camera. ... The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange Program, also known by the acronym MATRIX, was a federally funded data mining system originally developed for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement described as a tool to identify terrorist subjects. ... The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIP or RIPA) is a United Kingdom law covering the interception of communications. ... Purdue Universitys Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS, is currently being used by Homeland Security and the US Defense Department to simulate crises on the US mainland. ...

External links

Media coverage

• Harris, Shane. "TIA Lives On", The National Journal, February 26, 2006. 
• "Pentagon Defends Surveillance Program", The Washington Post, May 20, 2003. 
• Webb, Cynthia L.. "The Pentagon's PR Play", The Washington Post, May 21, 2003. 
• Bray, Hiawatha. "Mining Data to Fight Terror Stirs Privacy Fears", The Boston Globe, April 4, 2003, pp. C2. 
• McCullagh, Declan. "News.com.com Pentagon database plan hits snag on Hill", CNET News.com, January 15, 2003. 
• Markoff, John. "Chief Takes Over at Agency To Thwart Attacks on U.S.", The New York Times, February 13, 2002, pp. (first mainstream media mention of IAO). 

Academic articles

• K. A. Taipale (2003). "Data Mining and Domestic Security: Connecting the Dots to Make Sense of Data". Columbia Sci. & Tech. Law Review 5 (2): 1–83 (TIA discussed 39–50). 

Critical views (established sources)

• "TIA: Total Information Awareness", American Civil Liberties Union, January 16, 2004. 
• Charles V. Peña. "TIA: Information Awareness Office Makes Us a Nation of Suspects", Cato Institute, November 22, 2002. 
• "Total/Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA): Is It Truly Dead? EFF: It's Too Early to Tell", Electronic Frontier Foundation. 
• "Epic.org Total "Terrorism" Information Awareness (TIA): Latest News", Electronic Privacy Information Center. 
• "SPTimes.com A Times Editorial: Unfocused data-mining", St. Petersburg Times, January 24, 2003. 

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the common name for an American organization consisting of two separate entities. ... The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Institutes stated mission is to broaden the parameters of public policy debate to allow consideration of the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets, and peace by striving to achieve greater involvement... EFF Logo The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit advocacy and legal organization based in the United States with the stated purpose of being dedicated to preserving free speech rights such as those protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in the context of... Electronic Privacy Information Center or EPIC is a public interest research group in Washington D.C.. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values. ... Logo of the St. ...

Critical views (less well recognized)

• "Information Awareness Office Website Deletes Its Logo", TheMemoryHole.com. 

Proponent views

• Mac Donald, Heather. "Total Misrepresentation", The Weekly Standard, January 27, 2003. 
• Levin, Jonathan. "Total Preparedness: The case for the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness project", National Review, February 13, 2003. 
• Taylor, Jr., Stuart. "Big Brother and Another Overblown Privacy Scare", The Atlantic, December 10, 2002. 

Accord:

• Shane Ham & Robert D. Atkinson. "Using Technology to Detect and Prevent Terrorism", Progressive Policy Institute, 2002. 
• "Safegaurding Privacy in the Fight Against Terrorism", DOD Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee (TAPAC), March 2004. 

Also: The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a think tank in the United States, founded in 1989 and affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council. ...

• Ignatius, David. "Back in the Safe Zone", The Washington Post, August 1, 2003, pp. A19 (discussing opposition to the IAO FutureMap project).