History
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 attacks of September 11, 2001.[3]
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.
On August 2, 2002, Dr. Poindexter gave a speech at DARPAtech 2002 entitled "Overview of the Information Awareness Office"[5] in which he described the TIA program.
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.[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
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.[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.
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]
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 were:
Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID)
The Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) project developed automated biometric
identification technologies to detect, recognize and identify humans at
great distances for "force protection", crime prevention, and "homeland
security/defense" purposes.[10]
Its goals included programs to:[10]
- Develop algorithms for locating and acquiring subjects out to 150 meters (500 ft) in range.
- Fuse face and gait recognition into a 24/7 human identification system.
- Develop and demonstrate a human identification system that operates out to 150 meters (500 ft) using visible imagery.
- Develop a low power millimeter wave radar system for wide field of view detection and narrow field of view gait classification.
- Characterize gait performance from video for human identification at a distance.
- Develop a multi-spectral infrared and visible face recognition system.
Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery
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 (such as phone call records
from the NSA call database, internet histories, or bank records).[11]
EELD was designed to design systems with the ability to extract data
from multiple sources (e.g., text messages, social networking sites,
financial records, and web pages). It was to develop the ability to
detect patterns comprising multiple types of links between data items or
people communicating (e.g., financial transactions, communications,
travel, etc.).[11]
It is designed to link items relating potential "terrorist" groups
and scenarios, and to learn patterns of different groups or scenarios to
identify new organizations and emerging threats.[11]
Genisys
Genisys aimed at developing technologies which would enable "ultra-large, all-source information repositories".[12]
Vast amounts of information were going to be collected and analyzed, and the available database
technology at the time was insufficient for storing and organizing such
enormous quantities of data. So they developed techniques 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. "Effective analysis across heterogenous
databases" means the ability to take things from databases which are
designed to store different types of data—such as a database containing
criminal records, a phone call database
and a foreign intelligence database. The World Wide Web is considered
an "unstructured public data source" because it is publicly accessible
and contains many different types of data—such as blogs, emails, records
of visits to web sites, etc.—all of which need to be analyzed and
stored efficiently.[12]
Another goal was to develop "a large, distributed system architecture
for managing the huge volume of raw data input, analysis results, and
feedback, that will result in a simpler, more flexible data store that
performs well and allows us to retain important data indefinitely."[12]
Scalable Social Network Analysis
Scalable Social Network Analysis (SSNA) 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.[13]
Sean McGahan, of Northeastern University said the following in his study of SSNA:
The purpose of the SSNA algorithms program is to
extend techniques of social network analysis to assist with
distinguishing potential terrorist cells from legitimate groups of
people ... In order to be successful SSNA will require information on
the social interactions of the majority of people around the globe.
Since the Defense Department cannot easily distinguish between peaceful
citizens and terrorists, it will be necessary for them to gather data on
innocent civilians as well as on potential terrorists.
Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP)
Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP) was intended to harness collective intelligence by researching prediction market
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.[14] In laymans terms, FutureMap would be a website that allowed people to bet on when a terrorist attack would occur.[15] The bookie would have been the federal government.[15] Several Senators were outraged at the very notion of such a program.[15]
Then Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle said on the floor of the Senate
"I couldn't believe that we would actually commit $8 million to create a
Web site that would encourage investors to bet on futures involving
terrorist attacks and public assassinations. ... I can't believe that
anybody would seriously propose that we trade in death. ... How long
would it be before you saw traders investing in a way that would bring
about the desired result?"[15]
Democratic Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden said, "The idea of a federal
betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's
grotesque."[15]
The ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin
of Michigan, thought the program was so ridiculous that he thought
initial reports of it were the result of a hoax.[15] The program was then dropped.
TIDES
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.[16]
Outside groups (such as universities, corporations, etc.) were invited to participate in the annual information retrieval, topic detection and tracking, automatic content extraction, and machine translation evaluations run by NIST.[16]
Genoa / Genoa II
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.[17][18]
Another function was to be able to make estimates of possible future
scenarios to assist intelligence officials in deciding what to do,[19] in a manner similar to the DARPA's Deep Green program which is designed to assist Army commanders in making battlefield decisions.
Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (WAE)
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.[20]
Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text (EARS)
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. EARS was to focus on everyday
human-to-human speech from broadcasts and telephone conversations in
multiple languages.[21] It is expected to increase the speed with which speech can be processed by computers by 100 times or more.[19]
The intent is to create a core enabling technology (technology that
is used as a component for future technologies) suitable for a wide
range of future surveillance applications.[21]
Babylon
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.[22]
Bio-Surveillance
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]
Communicator
Communicator was to develop "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. The Communicator Platform was to be both
wireless and mobile, and to be designed to function in a networked
environment.[24]
The dialogue interaction software was to interpret the context
of the dialogue in order to improve performance, and to be capable of
automatically adapting to new topics (because situations quickly change
in war) so conversation is natural and efficient. The Communicator
program emphasized task knowledge to compensate for natural language
effects and noisy environments. Unlike automated translation of natural language
speech, which is much more complex due to an essentially unlimited
vocabulary and grammar, the Communicator program is directed task
specific issues so that there are constrained vocabularies (the system
only needs to be able to understand language related to war). Research
was also started to focus on foreign language computer interaction for
use in supporting coalition operations.[24]
Live exercises were conducted involving small unit logistics operations involving the United States Marines to test the technology in extreme environments.[24]
