Total Information Awareness Lives On

Those who follow the government's post-9/11 attempts to ferret out terrorism plots from massive amounts of data using algorithms have long known that the Total Information Awareness program never really died, despite Congress's funding cut.

Instead, parts of the program moved around and disappeared in the Pentagon and Intelligence communities' black budgets, which are classified.

But, Shane Harris of the National Journal brings news that the Director of National Intelligence is looking to bring TIA back to life in whole, this time with the name Tangram.

The system, which is run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the early research phases and is being tested, in part, with government intelligence that may contain information on U.S. citizens and other people inside the country. It encompasses existing profiling and detection systems, including those that create "suspicion scores" for suspected terrorists by analyzing very large databases of government intelligence, as well as records of individuals' private communications, financial transactions, and other everyday activities.

The details of the program, called Tangram, are contained in an unclassified document that National Journal obtained from a government contracting Web site. The document, called a "proposer's information packet," is a technical description of Tangram written for potential contractors who would help design and test the system. [...]

In addition to descriptions of Tangram, the document offers a rare and surprisingly candid analysis of intelligence agencies' fits and starts – and failures – in other efforts to profile terrorists through data mining: Researchers, for example, haven't moved beyond "guilt-by-association models" that link suspected terrorists to other, potentially innocent people, and then rank the suspects by level of suspicion.

Full story.

Don't miss the sidebar where Harris tries to solve the mystery of why the contracting document specifically refers to TIPS as a data source. For those who don't recall, TIPS was a database system proposed by then Attorney General John Ashcroft that would collect terrorism reports from meter readers, post office employees and the cable guy. Congress killed that program off too. Or did they?