Son of TIA Will Mine Asian Data
By Sharon Weinberger| Also by this reporter
12:00 PM Mar, 22, 2007
Nearly four years after Congress pulled the plug on what critics
assailed as an Orwellian scheme to spy on private citizens,
Singapore is set to launch an even more ambitious incarnation of
the Pentagon's controversial Total Information Awareness program --
an effort to collect and mine data across all government agencies
in the hopes of pinpointing threats to national security.
The Singapore prototype of the system -- dubbed Risk Assessment and
Horizon Scanning, or RAHS -- was rolled out early this week at a
conference in the Southeast Asia city-state. Retired U.S. Adm. John
Poindexter, the architect of the original Pentagon program,
traveled to Singapore to deliver a speech at the unveiling, while
backers have already begun quietly touting the system to U.S.
intelligence officials.
In 2003, plans for Total Information Awareness, or TIA, sparked
outrage among privacy advocates. TIA was one of several programs
run out of the Information Awareness Office at Darpa, the
Pentagon's advanced research projects agency. Fueling public
indignation was news that Poindexter, President Reagan's national
security adviser and a key figure in the '80s Iran-Contra scandal,
was in charge of the office.
Facing an avalanche of bad publicity, Poindexter resigned in August
2003. Congress pulled funding for the program, and TIA and related
programs were either terminated or moved to other agencies. The
Information Awareness Office was closed.
But Poindexter's vision never lost currency among advocates of data
mining, particularly in Singapore, a country that mixes elements of
democratic governance with authoritarian rule.
While different in design from TIA, the RAHS system shares some
intellectual roots with the doomed Darpa effort. The two principal
consultants for RAHS are John Peterson, of the Virginia-based
Arlington Institute, and Dave Snowden, who was previously supported
by Poindexter's office within Darpa, and is now the chief
scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based
company.
Peterson, a futurist, describes RAHS as a system that
monitors multiple feeds of data -- both open and classified -- to
detect possible threats. "Essentially it's a strategic tool that
ties together every one of the agencies in a government into a
large network that is constantly scanning the horizon looking for
weak signals that point toward the possibility of a significant
event that would have important implications for Singapore," he
said.
Snowden's work at Cognitive Edge concentrates on automated software
to detect such "weak signals" that would normally be passed over by
human analysts. "Instead of having analysts trawl through huge
amounts of data to decide what it means, the data is tagged very
quickly, then they decide what the patterns in the metadata mean,"
said Snowden.
While terrorism is a driving factor for RAHS, it was the SARS
epidemic -- which crippled Singapore's economy -- that prompted
interest in the technology, according to Patrick Nathan, deputy
director of the Singapore National Security Coordination Center.
"We are studying the application of the RAHS concepts and tools to
the social, and economic and financial domains," Nathan wrote in an
e-mail interview.
Whether terrorism or epidemics, Singapore's rapid acceptance of
data mining is a breath of fresh air to the system's designers.
"Singapore is small and has this intrinsic sense of paranoia,"
Peterson said.
"I think we would have been stuck in Darpa doing experimental
research for another 15 years without anyone making it
operational," Snowden said. "Singapore just walked around and saw
what they liked, and said, 'The hell with it, let's just make it
operational,' which is much more pragmatic and
forward-thinking."
While the controversial Darpa efforts were never more than
research, RAHS is set to launch with five different agencies in
September. Eventually, RAHS would extend across Singapore's entire
government, a plan that makes it the most ambitious data-snooping
effort in the world.
Those involved in the Singapore system are well aware of the
brouhaha over TIA, but say they are less concerned about RAHS.
Snowden pointed out that although RAHS would pore through
everything from health records to raw intelligence, only the
"metadata" is shared among agencies, and not the data itself.
Likewise, officials in Singapore are thinking about the privacy
debate. Nathan said that at this stage, RAHS will focus on
"open-source information" until the procedures for classified data
can be worked out. In parallel, Singapore is running a pilot
project on data anonymization, he added.
Steven Aftergood, head of the Federation of American Scientists'
Project on Government Secrecy, said that while he wasn't familiar
with RAHS, privacy issues are important in any data-mining system.
"Some government officials attempt to finesse the privacy issue by
insisting that individual records and data will not normally be
shared or subject to examination by a human observer so, they
argue, there is no real infringement on privacy," he wrote in an
e-mail. "But that doesn't get to the heart of the issue. Personal
privacy is compromised whenever one is subject to unwanted
surveillance, even by a machine."
For Snowden, the balance between privacy and security is more
clear-cut. "If somebody can use a little bit of software that
connects up the conversation between somebody trying to get into
Britain, and four or five stories told by parents of pupils in a
school in an area with a high Islamic population, and some police
intelligence reports, and see there's a pattern, I think that's a
good thing," he said.
Of course Snowden concedes that how the public views the privacy
issue depends on "how people explain it and how it's sold."
That's where the conference in Singapore comes in. The goal of the
symposium, which took place Monday and Tuesday, was "to expose this
thing to the international world," said the Arlington Institute's
Peterson. Officials from the United Kingdom, Australia, the United
States, New Zealand and Israel were invited to attend.
The conference follows a visit to Washington, D.C., the first week
in March by a Singapore delegation to discuss RAHS with U.S.
intelligence and Homeland Security officials. The Singaporeans had
on their agenda meetings with Charles Allen, DHS' assistant
secretary for intelligence and analysis, and Patrick Neary,
strategy chief for National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell,
according to the PR firm hired by the Singapore government to
publicize the trip, though the planned meeting with Neary didn't
take place. Neither DHS nor the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence would comment on their interest in the program.
Poindexter, who was also on the roster of people the Singaporeans
were scheduled to meet with in the United States, never quite
disappeared from the data-mining scene. In January of this year, he
was elected to the board of BrightPlanet, a firm that boasts "the
most powerful search, harvest and document federation technology
available in the world." The company's press release announcing
Poindexter's appointment noted the former national security adviser
would "provide guidance in developing further contacts within the
intelligence community."
As for Poindexter's association with RAHS and his appearance at
this week's conference, Nathan noted that meetings with the former
Darpa manager are consultative. "We have no formal relationship
with John Poindexter but have met him to exchange ideas and
perspectives," he said.
Whether formal or informal, everyone involved in RAHS is aware that
Poindexter has proved a lightning rod for critics of data mining.
Recalling the events that led to the closing of Poindexter's
office, Snowden, who describes himself as "on the left
politically," was candid about the man he still calls a
friend.
"He's a genius," Snowden said, "but he's a naive genius; he didn't
realize how it was going to be picked up."
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http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,73046-0.html?tw=rss.index
Another product of Singapore-DARPA collaboration. First was the
Spartan UCSV and then RAFAEL Protector UCSV.