The Tyranny of Terrorist Information Awareness – May.31.2003
By Gary Morton
http://citizensontheweb.ca

    The FBI will open a field office in Canada soon. This follows the Secret Service which opened a Canadian office last November. Working with the CIA, US intelligence services will probe thousands of Canadians as a counter terrorism measure. Counter terrorism Flying Squads can and will take action against suspects.

    PNAC or The Project for the New American Century think tank that produced the Bush Government and its policy goals has control of the Internet as one of its key goals. Now a connection has been found between Google and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Recently Google agreed to block Indy Media from its search engine to aid Rumsfeld, indicating that alternative media is a target of the American administration.

    The US Total Information Awareness Project will allow US authorities to search a wide range of public and private data. There was an outcry in the States over the scope of this plan, so President Bush responded by renaming it Terrorist Information Awareness. This makes it look like it is only about spying on terrorists when it is really about spying on anyone they look up with the system.

    The Pentagon announced that the program would include safeguards to protect the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. But there are no real safeguards and they won’t apply outside the United States. US watchdog group, the Federation of American Scientists reported on their web site this May that Congress passed new legislation giving intelligence agencies sweeping powers to spy on non Americans.

     Now that removal of the rights of all non Americans has been enshrined in law the Secret Service/FBI/CIA agents operating in Canada have a green light and will see it as their duty to spy on and break into the homes of Canadians they view as anti American and possibly aiding the terrorist threat.

    U.S. plans to set up a system of global electronic surveillance to fight terrorism also threaten the basic privacy rights of European Union citizens. Stefano Rodota, chairman of the EU's national privacy watchdogs, said the TIA plan evoked the specter of George Orwell's Big Brother and called on EU member states to raise the issue at an EU-U.S. summit in June.

    In Europe Washington has demanded that EU airlines hand over information on passengers traveling to the United States and the request has been accepted even though it is in breach of EU privacy laws. EU privacy laws say private data can be transferred to a third party only with the individual's consent and in this case there are no reassurances that data collected will not be misused.

    Microsoft has also been involved as EU privacy watchdogs obtained a commitment from the U.S. software giant to modify its .NET Passport authentication system. It is not certain that changes will protect privacy. They must be put to the test, and it must be kept in mind that Microsoft rarely builds any software that doesn’t have some kind of hidden backdoor access to the information.

   So far the EU can’t even defend itself against U.S. spam flooding the email system as American companies sue whenever their spam is blocked by EU laws. Protecting privacy will be even more difficult.

    Biometric screening such as face recognition and finger printing are procedures the United States is considering applying to foreigners entering its borders. Radio-frequency identification, tiny wireless transmitters applied to clothes, razors and other everyday items to track their movements in stores are being developed.

    At the top of intelligence Stephen Cambone, a protégé of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has assumed sweeping power over the Pentagon's intelligence bureaucracy as the new undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz announced the setting up of the new office of undersecretary of defense for intelligence and placed Cambone at the helm of the Pentagon's intelligence bureaucracy.

    The office takes over all persons and policies attached to intelligence, counterintelligence and security. Paul Wolfowitz’s memorandum stipulates that the new undersecretary will exercise authority, direction, and control over the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Organization, the National Security Agency, the Defense Security Service and the Counterintelligence Field Activity. Pentagon intelligence agencies consume the lion's share of the overall intelligence allocations, estimated to be about $35 billion annually.

     There is a new title for the Pentagon's chief information officer. This person is now assistant defense secretary for networks and information integration and will report directly to the secretary of defense. The post also comes with new authority over Pentagon space activities. During the Iraq war the Pentagon held control of media reports using embedded reporters and its own reports. Now it seems that propaganda and news media control will stretch from the ground to outer space.

    Tied to the system is US homeland security and it is now removing distinctions between anti-government protests and terrorism. The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center gathers information on activists and recently it directed police and extreme violence against an anti-war rally at the Port of Oakland.

    Since Sept. 11, 2001 government and commercial databases that track the movements and backgrounds of Americans have ballooned. This includes info gathered through the USA Patriot Act. Under the Act through Congress in section 215 authorities have the powers of a grand jury to issue subpoenas to all manner of businesses, including libraries and bookstores for records on individuals.

    DARPA is currently developing and tuning the software aspect of TIA using foreign intelligence and counter intelligence information and artificial data that has been generated. The Privacy Advocate ensuring the protection of the rights of Americans and others is the Secretary of Defense in control of the system. Donald Rumsfeld will assess emerging privacy and civil liberties impacts through an oversight board composed of senior representatives from DoD and the Intelligence Community, and chaired by the Under Secretary of Defense.

    In this cruel joke not only does Big Brother develop and run the system. He also disguises himself as the protector of civil liberties and controls legal and policy issues, including privacy, posed by TIA. Reports on privacy threats will come from the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence.

   To provide some safeguards the Secretary of Defense will receive advice on legal and policy issues, including privacy, posed by TIA research and development from a Federal Advisory Committee composed of outside experts. Genisys Privacy Protection will supposedly safeguard the privacy of U.S. persons by documenting and auditing information collected according to a certain formula.

    In his State of the Union Address, President Bush announced TIA as a linking of the Director of Central Intelligence and the Director of the FBI, working with the Attorney General, and the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense to develop the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. This new center will merge and analyze information collected domestically and abroad to form the most comprehensive possible threat picture.

    Currently Total Information Awareness has been used in analyzing data from detainees from Afghanistan and assessing weapons of mass destruction in the Iraqi situation. In these two areas the system has failed completely.

    TIA agencies include U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command; National Security Agency; Defense Intelligence Agency; Central Intelligence Agency; DoD’s Counterintelligence Field Activity; U.S. Strategic Command; Special Operations Command; Joint Forces Command; Joint Warfare Analysis Center.

    In using TIA a key element is mining synthetic, artificial data that has been generated to resemble and model real-world patterns of behavior. This will key into a centralized database storing information gathered from various publicly or privately held databases. Since there are few safeguards on information in the USA they will be able to mine all sorts of records and feed them into a model of reality that is really the reality perceived by Donald Rumsfeld and the right wing nuts from the Project for a New American Century. A model of reality that will define everyone who isn’t tied to Republican and American fundamentalist extremism as an enemy of the state and possible terrorist.

     More privacy concerns have been raised about TIA data search and analysis tools: Genisys, Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery, Scalable Social Network Analysis, and MisInformation Detection.

     TIA will pull in lots of data and create profiles, and in the end the TIA information as the superior collection will become viewed as the authoritative evidence. This gives the Secretary of Defense the ability to create reality. Their profile in TIA as the best collection of gathered data added to their subset will be the one the media and the courts believe. Yet look back and you see that the gathered information fills in a framework that is set by the ideology of the people in control. In TIA’s new reality any citizen of the world and especially any activist could be recreated as a terrorist and the courts would take that TIA description as fact.

    An innocent citizen could even end up like Arnie S. in an adventure movie. A switch in TIA information recreating him/her as a terrorist forced to flee from government agents.

    In the end elements of the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, the DCI’s Counterterrorist Center, and the Department of Defense will use a Terrorist Threat Integration Center to fuse and analyze all-source information related to terrorism and ensure that all agencies share the information.

    A threat picture will be created and counterterrorism will be directed according to it using an up-to-date database of known and suspected terrorists. Raw reports to finished analytic assessments will be used and a senior multiagency team will finalize the details and implementation strategy. With raw reports accepted and ideological control, the data won’t necessarily be accurate at all.

    The FBI has new counterterrorism Flying Squads to deploy into the field at a moment’s notice in all of its Field Offices. It will use a revolutionary new data management system to ensure that it shares all the terrorism-related information. In the event of a terrorist threat to the USA the flying squads will go into action world wide.

     Vulnerability assessments of the Nation’s critical infrastructure and key assets could direct counterterrorism agents to various locations. Meaning political protest could be targeted. Information on terrorist threats will be disseminated quickly to public, private industry, and state and local governments. A release of information that means a person’s boss could receive a bulletin describing his employee as an active terrorist.

    Added to this entire system is a new LifeLog program by DARPA to make your life indexable and searchable. The technology will give the federal government the capability to operate the most massive domestic surveillance program in history, putting the financial, medical and other details of private lives in the hands of bureaucrats.

    This is an intrusive spying program designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index it and make it searchable. The Defense Department’s LifeLog program will take every e-mail you've sent or received, every picture you've taken, every web page you've surfed, every phone call you've had, every TV show you've watched, every magazine you've read, and dump it into a giant database.

    All of this and more would be combined with a GPS transmitter, to keep tabs on where you're going; audio-visual sensors, to capture all that you see or say; and biomedical monitors, to keep track of your health. An agency with access to the database could retrieve a thread of past transactions, or recall a life experience by using a search-engine interface.

    In the USA there are no real limitations on government access to commercial databases. Current laws, like the Privacy Act, were adopted in the 1970s and don't apply to new technologies. If TIA is relying on personal information contained in databases to determine whether someone is a suspect, there is no recourse for a person whose information has been entered incorrectly. An error rate as small as a tenth of a percent could result in more than 30,000 innocent Americans being investigated as terrorists. Mistakes mean there is no guarantee TIA will catch the bad guys.

    Last January an FBI agent entered a branch of the St. Louis Public Library and requested a list of all the sign-up sheets showing names of people who used library computers on Dec. 28, 2002. Even though the FBI agent did not have a warrant or subpoena, the library quickly surrendered the list of all users. The FBI acted because someone phoned in a tip that they smelled something strange about a library patron of Middle Eastern descent.

    Federal agents cannibalize Americans’ e-mail with Carnivore wiretaps. They commandeer library records, and require banks to surrender personal account information. Agents confiscate bulk cash from travelers who fail to fill out Customs Service forms. The attorney general orders long-term detentions if he believes the alien is engaged in any activity that endangers the national security of the United States. Last year Ashcroft issued 170 emergency domestic spying warrants, permitting agents to carry out wiretaps and search homes and offices for up to 72 hours before requesting a search warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

    The Department of Transportation has compiled secret No Fly lists of passengers suspected of terrorist ties or critical of the administration. In one instance, two dozen members of a peace group, students chaperoned by a priest and nun, were detained en route to a teach-in.

    Patriot Act II will revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to permit the U.S. government to label individuals who are suspected terrorists as foreign powers for the purpose of conducting total surveillance of their activities. This nullifies all Fourth Amendment rights, allowing the government to tap phones, search computers, and read e-mail even when there is no evidence that a citizen is violating any statute. The more people the feds wrongfully accuse of being terrorists, the more power federal agents will receive.

    Section 129, entitled Strengthening Access to and Use of Information in National Security Investigations, would empower federal agents to issue national security letters that compel businesses and other institutions to surrender confidential or proprietary information without a court order. Anyone hit with such a letter will be obliged to remain forever silent on the demand with disclosure punishable by up to five years in prison.

   Secret mass arrests could be the result of Section 201. In the wake of 9/11, the feds locked up over 1,200 special interest detainees and continually insisted that none of their names or details of their cases could be disclosed without endangering national survival. To save the Justice Department the bother of having to defend secret round-ups, the Bush administration now seeks to amend the federal statute book to imitate repressive dictatorships. People will simply disappear.

    Section 402 would permit U.S. attorneys to prosecute Americans for aiding terrorist organizations even if they made donations to organizations that the U.S. government did not publicly label as terrorist groups.

    Users of Pretty Good Privacy and other common encryption software could face greater perils from Section 404, which creates a new, separate crime of using encryption technology that could add five years or more to any sentence for crimes committed with a computer.

    Section 501 of the bill is the citizenship death penalty. Under existing law, an American must state his intent to relinquish his citizenship in order to lose it. Under this provision, intent need not be manifested in words but can be inferred from conduct, thus empowering the Justice Department to strip Americans of their citizenship if the feds accuse them of supporting terrorism.

    Targeted U.S. citizens could find themselves consigned to indefinite detention as undocumented immigrants in their own country.

    The US Justice Department has used many of the anti-terrorism powers granted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to pursue defendants for crimes unrelated to terrorism, including drug violations, credit card fraud and bank theft.

    So to end we see that it is all related. This is an incredible ideologically motivated police sweep that ties criminals and terrorists with people that have political opinions and others whose names happen to come up. Any piece of data, like a record on your hair transplant or minor plastic surgery could lead to your arrest as a terrorist.

    This is Bush’s neo Fascist planet. Don’t look out your window because the Flying Squads might be there. They’re probably online reading what you are writing now. And who knows where you’ll end up when they’ve added a few keystrokes and artificial information to your profile.