When the US Congress curtailed Pentagon research it feared would ensnare innocent Americans in the terrorism fight, it also allowed the Bush administration to eliminate two projects to protect citizens' privacy from futuristic tools.
As a result, the government is quietly pressing ahead with research into high-powered computer data-mining technology without the two most advanced privacy protections developed for those terror-fighting tools.
"It's very inconsistent what they've done," said Teresa Lunt of the Palo Alto Research Center and head of one of the two government-funded privacy projects eliminated last fall.
Even members of Congress such as Senator Ron Wyden, who led the fight to restrict the Pentagon terrorism research over its privacy implications, remain uncertain about the nature of the research or the safeguards.
"We feel Congress is not getting enough information about who is undertaking this research and where it's headed and how they intend to protect the civil liberties of Americans," said Chris Fitzgerald, Wyden's spokesman.
The privacy projects were small parts of the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness research.
The project was the brainchild of retired Admiral John Poindexter, who was driven from the Reagan administration in 1986 over the Iran-Contra scandal. Some 15 years later, he was summoned back by the Bush administration to develop data-mining tools for the fight against terrorism.
Poindexter's new software tools, far more powerful than existing commercial products, would have allowed government agents to quickly scan the private commercial transactions and personal health records of millions of Americans and foreigners for telltale signs of terrorist activity.
Partly to appease critics, Poindexter also was developing two tools that would have concealed names on records during the scans. Only if agents discovered concrete evidence of terrorist activities would they have been permitted to learn the identities of the people whose records aroused suspicion.
One privacy project worked with Poindexter's Genisys program, which scanned government and commercial records for terrorist planning. The other was part of his Bio-ALIRT program, which scanned private health records for evidence of biological attacks.
Late last year, Congress closed Poindexter's office in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in response to the uproar over its impact on privacy.
But Congress allowed some Poindexter projects, including some data-mining research, to be transferred to intelligence agencies. Congress also left intact similar data-mining research begun in the fall of 2002 by the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), a little-known office that works on behalf of US intelligence.
The research sponsored by ARDA, called Novel Intelligence from Massive Data, is so similar to some work done for Poindexter that Lunt offered to adapt her privacy protection software. ARDA was uninterested.
"When I went to talk to them, ARDA made clear they don't want to get into any area Congress doesn't want to fund," Lunt said.
It's not clear what, if any, privacy research is being done by ARDA or by the surviving remnants of Poindexter's program.
Last fall's Intelligence Authorization Act approved continued research on the type of powerful data mining Poindexter envisioned but said "the policies and procedures necessary to safeguard individual liberties and privacy should occur concurrently with the development of these analytic tools, not as an afterthought."
ARDA said it obeys all privacy laws and has not given its researchers any government or private data. But it declined to say whether it was sponsoring any research on privacy protection.
Lunt, who used to be a DARPA program manager, was developing privacy protection software for Poindexter's Genisys program.
Her software-shielded identities in the records the government reviewed restricted each intelligence analyst to only the data he or she was authorized to see and created a permanent record to track cheaters.
In reviewing the rise and fall of Poindexter's project, the Pentagon's inspector general concluded the failure to address privacy problems from the outset of future data-mining research risks developing "systems that may not be either deployable or used to their fullest potential without costly revision."
Professor LaTanya Sweeney of Carnegie Mellon University was the principal researcher developing privacy protections for the Bio-ALIRT project. An early version of Bio-ALIRT was used to help protect President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration.
She also presented her work last fall to officials of various agencies she was told "might want to continue the work. But they came through with zero dollars."
"The tool just sits there unused," she said. "People think they have to sacrifice privacy to get safety. And it doesn't have to be that way."
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese