Headlines, Human Rights, North America

RIGHTS-US: Washington Rolls Out Big Brother Database

Gabriel Packard*

NEW YORK, Jul 2 2003 (IPS) - The Hollywood movie "Minority Report" starred Tom Cruise as a cop in a world where a trio of omnipotent psychics predict crimes before they happen and suspects are punished before they can do the deed. The U.S. government, in similar fashion, is developing a sprawling computer system to predict terrorist activity and identify terrorists.

The Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project will use cutting-edge technology to automatically monitor and look for suspicious patterns in telephone records, credit card transactions, broadcasts, phone calls, relationships, internet use, medical files, legal information and travel details and a myriad of other data sources.

The information dragnet TIA – which is headed by John Poindexter, who was convicted of several felonies, including lying to congress, during the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal – will be spread more widely than any other that has ever existed.

The government says the focus will be on non-citizens. But it is by no means the only channel through which the government is looking for access to data on foreign nationals.

In April, the press reported that U.S. firm ChoicePoint had bought files on millions of citizens of eight Latin American countries. The company had been selling the data to more than a dozen government agencies, the Department of Homeland Security in particular.

Earlier this month, ChoicePoint agreed to hand back its Mexican data files after outrage in Mexico and a long negotiation between Mexico, the U.S. government and ChoicePoint executives.

While several of the target countries have launched investigations, ChoicePoint continues to supply the U.S. government with data on citizens of Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

"Data trafficking is a violation of the right to privacyàa fundamental human right," said Daniel Camacho, coordinator of the non-governmental Commission for the Defence of Human Rights in Central America (CODEHUCA).

"Some countries have already incorporated this right in their legislation – for example, the United States," he said. – For that reason, what the (President George W.) Bush clan cannot do in their own country, they are trying to do elsewhere."

And unlike U.S. citizens, foreign nationals have no representatives in Congress to protect their interests, says Mahir Ksirsagar, a policy analyst for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which, incidentally, first discovered ChoicePoint’s Latin American data.

Although a lack of data protection laws enables both schemes to access foreign data, the scope of TIA dwarfs that of ChoicePoint’s Latin database, which is limited mainly to basic information from electoral registers.

In fact, the Terrorism Information Awareness project is by far the most wide-reaching data-monitoring project ever attempted, many analysts agree.

Video cameras, for example, will feed images to a programme called Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) which will automatically identify individuals from up to 500 feet away using technology that recognises faces, irises, and a person’s unique posture and way of moving (gait recognition). Infrared and hyperspectral technology will mean that Big Brother will still be watching you in the dark and in all weather conditions.

A system called EARS (Effective, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-text) will automatically listen to and transcribe telephone conversations and broadcasts as well as "multi-speaker environments (e.g. communal centers, teleconferences and meetings)", says a report presented to Congress last month by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the wing of the Defence Department responsible for TIA.

"With EARS," the report brags, "the United States could have 1,000 times more ‘ears’ working on exploiting voice communications than we do now."

HumanID and EARS are just two small parts of this massive data-mining project, which will have systems constantly patrolling nearly every available source of information and looking for patterns and that might indicate terrorist activity.

TIA, for example, will use a system called Scalable Social Network Analysis (SSNA), which is designed to examine and keep track of people’s relationships, the groups to which they belong, the people they come in to contact with, friends of friends, and associates of associates of associates.

A number of trials are already underway to test out the TIA system. But the only data being used at present, says DARPA, is already legally available to the government or is artificial data created to test particular scenarios.

Eight of the nine agencies testing the system are units of the Department of Defense, such as the Joint Warfare Analysis Center, and the ninth is the CIA.

The report says that DARPA is just beginning these tests and does not yet have any results to report.

Even though the results are not yet in, the report says that actual use of TIA is "likely to occur in 2004" – just six months away.

But while the government tests its "Minority Report"-style program, an increasingly large body of opposition is fighting to make sure that, in this case, life does not imitate art.

"Our country must fight terrorism, but America should not unleash virtual bloodhounds to sniff into the financial, educational, travel and medical reports of millions of Americans," said Democrat senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, speaking to reporters after a TIA review earlier this year.

Wyden is one of three Democratic senators and a raft of interest groups – both liberal and conservative – that oppose the TIA.

A spokesman for EPIC, one of the groups to present evidence at a recent hearing on TIA, said his group emphasised that TIA "looks for crimes that have not been committed by people who have not committed crimes." He added that EPIC urged Congress to ask questions such as, "What rights do those people have? And is this project compatible with American values?"

Also presenting evidence were groups such as the liberal American Civil Liberties Union and the conservative Americans for Tax Reform.

Ron Wyden along with fellow Democratic senator, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, has pledged to block funding of TIA until Congress has a chance to thoroughly review the project’s implications.

Another Democrat, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, has complained that TIA takes an "Orwellian approach."

Pressure from these senators and non-governmental groups has already made sure that federal agents must first get senatorial approval before using TIA to gather information on any U.S. citizen.

The Information Awareness Office and DARPA were also made to submit a report on TIA to Congress May 20.

They used the opportunity to re-christen the project Terrorism Information Awareness – it was previously called Total Information Awareness. DARPA says that the name was changed to stop the false impression that the aim of TIA is to gather dossiers of information on citizens.

But EPIC’s Mahir Kshirsagar remains sceptical. "The Pentagon is trying hard to pretend that this is just a problem of public relations," he said. "But actually it is one of substance. The original name accurately reflected what TIA is doing."

*Nefer Munoz also contributed to this story