And, finally, DARPA’s own website, www.darpa.mil, describes its best personnel
as being “freewheeling zealots in pursuit of their goals.” Total Information Awareness, Total Authority
Omniscience is God’s game, not that of mortal man, let alone big government. But, of course, godliness in government is extinct everywhere but in Arabia and the U.S., as John Ashcroft demonstrated in 1999 when he claimed in a speech to Bob Jones University graduates that America “has no king but Jesus, no standard but the eternal authority.” According to him and other higher ups, America was founded on religious principles.
Then why not have a Department of Defense (DoD) under the same pretenses as the Church in Medieval Europe, since it has already created the Information Awareness Office (IAO), which seeks to oversee the entire vast and multitudinous American public?
So, what the DoD is — or rather — already has been developing prior to 9/11, under the aegis of the DoD’s Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is a series of programs collectively called Total Information Awareness System (TIA), designed to do a variety of tasks that threaten every citizens’ privacy. As wired.com reports, "The Total Information Awareness program, with its ability to provide persistent storage of everything from credit card, to employment, to medical, to ISP records, is a recipe for civil liberties disaster..."
Other tasks under TIA’s umbrella range from speedy translation of Persian and Arabic languages to quick database interfacing to the development of technology to identify individuals by their gait and body movement or, get this, by their smell. (A series of experiments on moths and their odorant molecules were conducted for this ongoing research project at Georgia Tech University, one of many universities working with the IAO).
In other words, the idea, as stated on the program’s website, is to “counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness [of the American public] useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making.” This includes seer-like programs designed seemingly to predict the future. These programs include FutureMAP, which focuses on how the market is acting in order to identify potential threats disturbing it, Human ID, which is working to identify individuals by their characteristic body movements, like a limp, “truth maintenance,” and even “story telling” is put into its mission statement for some indiscernible reason.
And, finally, DARPA’s own website, www.darpa.mil, describes its best personnel
as being “freewheeling zealots in pursuit of their goals.”
DARPA seems like science fiction at its best, but unfortunately for civil rights advocates it is has been reality for years already (it was only recently that TIA was given its name by the private company Visual Analytics, Inc., who is seeking to register trademark). And although most of its projects are unfinished, highly experimental, and perhaps completely impractical, as the website suggests, some, such as GENOA, a computer program developed during the Clinton administration to rapidly analyze data, do manage to get the DoD’s approval for its own use.
Even without the DoD’s stamp of approval, there is a real possibility the projects’ commercial application assumes that technological omniscience has commercial value.
“DARPA doesn’t do any of its own research,” said spokeswoman for the agency Jan Walker according to the Center for Public Integrity (a government watchdog group based in D.C. that concentrates on government and corporate accountability). “Many [of DARPA’s projects] have commercial applications,” she said, and the terms for commercial uses are negotiated on a case-by-case basis with the contractors.
As the Center reports, DARPA’s three biggest current private contractors for TIA are, from the largest to the smallest, Lockheed Martin Corporation (the venerable weapons manufacturer) at $27 million; Booz Allen Hamilton (a major international management and technology consulting firm) at $23 million; and Schafer Corporation (which specializes in developing technology in any field from defense to the environment) at $15 million. The rest are Adroit Systems, CACI Dynamic Systems, Syntek Technologies, and ASI Systems International.
Along with these clients are 24 universities that are altogether given contracts worth $10 million. Cornell University, Columbia University, and University of California at Berkeley are among the more well known.
TIA’s lineage goes all the way back to the Cold War in 1958 when DARPA, which hosts IAO, was first established as a reaction to the launching of Russia’s Sputnik. That great event, as stated on DARPA’s website, created a desire among the feds to “assure that the U.S. maintains a lead in applying state-of-the-art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprise from her adversaries.”
In order to do this, its key principles, which have lasted until this day (now with terrorism replacing communism as the new Great Scare), are autonomy, independence, lack of bureaucratization, and extreme technological innovation. It is essentially a very expensive laboratory with very little accountability — or incentives for civic responsibility. So much so that Congress knows very little about IAO.
The Center For Public Integrity reported that as of the publication date of its report (12/17/02) on TIA, titled Outsourcing Big Brother: Total Information Awareness Relies on Private Sector to Track Americans, Congress had not held any hearings on the program, even though it is responsible for checking up on the executive and military branch’s endeavors in order to represent and protect the taxpayers who fund TIA. It also said that its sources on Capitol Hill suggest that very few are aware of the program.
Suspiciously, the man who runs TIA is John Poindexter who, in the words of the Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr., “was convicted in 1990 of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing congressional inquiries into the Iran-contra affair...” 11/12/02.
“Poindexter, a retired Navy rear admiral,” O’Harrow adds, “was the highest-ranking Reagan administration official found guilty in the scandal. He was sentenced to six months in jail by a federal judge who called him ‘the decision-making head’ of a scheme to deceive Congress. The U.S. Court of Appeals overturned that conviction in 1991, saying Poindexter’s rights had been violated through the use of testimony he had given to Congress after being granted immunity.”
However, Congressman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), upon being briefed by the DoD on the nature of TIA, felt too many questions were left unanswered and asked that they conduct a full investigation of the program. Among his concerns stated in a letter he wrote to the DoD’s Inspector General, Joseph E. Schmitz, according to www.fas.org/sgp/news/2002, were infringements on civil rights, lack of accountability, and the misuse of American tax dollars.
The DoD has not yet begun an inquiry.
Although the DoD claimed in the briefing that the program was meant to aid law enforcement agencies, according to Grassley’s letter, he was concerned about it being developed in secrecy without law enforcement input. This could possibly act as a drainage hole for American taxpayer money, a genuine concern considering that despite “good stewardship of taxpayer’s money,” DARPA’s website quixotically states as one of its principles, “a complete acceptance of failure if the payoff of success was high enough.”
However, DARPA is raising some red flags on Capitol Hill. Senator Russel Feingold (D-Wi) introduced legislation asking for a moratorium on any data-mining activities by TIA, the DoD, and Homeland Security as well, as reported on the American Civil Liberties Union’s website, www.aclu.org. The bill is called “The Data-Mining Moratorium Act” (s. 188) and will require a report to congress on TIA and similar data-mining schemes.
The ACLU also reports that Jerry Nadler (D-NY) is proposing a similar bill.
The Center reports that the overall budget for TIA in fiscal year 2001 was $43 million, and will triple into $110 million in fiscal year 2003. The information comes from declassified budgets that can be seen, along with its report, on the Center’s website at www.publicintegrity.org. Other groups that have targeted TIA are Total Information Awareness Resource Center at www.geocities.com/totalinformationawareness/ and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) at www.epic.org.
And remember, when you sign on and see all the myriad programs listed on the site (not just the couple dozen under the rubric of TIA, but the tons of acronyms listed under DARPA, the mother of them all), think about just what might be going on in there, the place where the “free-wheeling zealots” play God and passionately pursue real omniscience, or in other words — without you even knowing.
The TIA’s website is
www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems
Illustration by Ian Heimlich