Information Awareness Office Introduction Public Protests

The IAO originally had a mission of Total Information Awareness -- amended in May of 2003 to Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA). John Poindexter, former National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan served as the first head of the IAO.

On approximately December 19, 20022002 is a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). 2002 was the first palindromic year since 1991 and the last until 2112. 2002 was also designated: International Year of Ecotourism and Mountains National Science Year in the United Kingdom, the pyramid logo disappeared without comment from the official IAO webpage, presumably in response to widespread criticism of its Masonic/ IlluminatiThis is an article about groups called Illuminati''. For information on the games, see Illuminati (game) and Illuminati: New World Order''. For the novels, see The Illuminatus! Trilogy''. The Illuminati is the name of many groups, modern and historical, r overtones. The biographies of senior staffers also disappeared. For the former page, see the archived mirror [1][2].

The IAO has the stated mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralized location, for easy perusal by the United States government, including (though not limited to) InternetThis article is about the Internet the extensive, worldwide computer network available to the public. An internet is a more general term for a set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking''. WWW information network structu activity, credit cardA credit card system is a type of retail transaction settlement and credit system, named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system. A credit card is different from a debit card in that the credit card issuer loans the consumer money rathe purchase histories, airlineAn airline is an organization providing aviation services to passengers and/or cargo. It owns or leases airliners with which to supply these services and may form partnerships or alliances with other airlines for reasons of mutual benefit. Airline service ticket purchases, carAn automobile usually called a car (an old word for carriage) or a truck is a wheeled vehicle that carries its own engine. Older terms include horseless carriage and motor car with "motor" referring to what is now usually called the engine. The act of ope rentals, medical records, educationEducation encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, good judgement and wisdom. One of the fundamental goals of education is to impart culture across the generations (al transcripts, driver's licenseEuropean Union are subdivided in different categories. A driver's license ( UK: driving licence US: driver's license or driver license Canada, Australia, New Zealand: driver's licence is an official document which states that a person has the necessary qus, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data. In essence, the IAO’s goal is to develop the capacity to recreate a life history of thoughts and movements for any individual on the planet on demand, which the Bush administration deems necessary to counter the threat of terrorism. Critics claim the very existence of the IAO completely disregards the concept of individual privacy and liberties. They see the organization as far too invasive and prone to abuse.

The first mention of the IAO in the media came from New York Times reporter John Markoff on February 13, 2002, with few details available as to the agency's role or activities. In the following months, as more and more information emerged about the IAO's full scope, protests among civil libertarians grew over what they see as the IAO's disturbingly Orwellian mission, especially within the larger framework of other invasive homeland security measures and policies implemented by the Bush administration. The integrity of Poindexter as head of the IAO also came under scrutiny, given his conviction on five felony charges for lying to Congress and deliberately altering and destroying documents pertaining to the Iran-Contra Affair.

On January 16, 2003, US Senator Russ Feingold introduced legislation to halt the activity of the IAO and the Total Information Awareness initiative pending a Congressional review of privacy issues involved. A similar measure introduced by Senator Ron Wyden would bar the IAO from operating within the United States unless specifically authorized to do so by Congress, and would shut the IAO down entirely 60 days after passage, unless either the Pentagon prepared a report assessing the impact of IAO activities on individual privacy and civil liberties, or the President ceritifies the program's research as vital to national security interests.

Congress passed legislation in February of 2003 halting activities of the IAO pending a Congressional report of the office's activities. Action in the US Congress to attempt to halt a specific internal Department of Defense project occurs extremely rarely, underscoring the grave threat to civil liberties and privacy that many lawmakers perceive in the Information Awareness Office.

DARPA changed the name of the "Total Information Awareness" program to "Terrorist Information Awareness" on May 20, 2003, emphasizing in its report to Congress that the program is not designed to compile dossiers on US citizens, but rather to gather information on terrorist networks. Despite this name change and reassurance, the description of the program's activities remained essentially the same in the report, and critics continue to see the system as prone to massive Orwellian abuses.

A Senate defense appropriations bill passed unanimously on July 18, 2003 explicitly denies any funding to Terrorist Information Awareness research, which will effectively kill the program if implemented. [3] [4]

2 Public protests against the Information Awareness Office

Extensive criticism of the IAO in the traditional media and on the Internet has come from from both left-wing and right-wing civil libertarians, who see the unprecendented systematic categorization and access to information that it will enable as a grave threat to individual liberties, and another step farther down the slippery slope to a totalitarian state.

On November 27, 2002, San Francisco Weekly columnist Matt Smith decided to illustrate the perils of information proliferation to John Poindexter personally by publishing a column containing Poindexter's home address and phone number, along with those of his next-door neighbors. The information quickly propagated through the Internet, and protestors created numerous web sites with this data, including satellite photographs of Poindexter's house.

3 IAO research

As part of the IAO's "Total Information Awareness" program the organization has started to research several new technologies:

Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text, or EARS, has a stated goal of "developing speech-to-text (automatic transcription) technology whose output is substantially richer and much more accurate than currently possible." This program focuses on broadcast and telephone human conversations in multiple languages, necessary for the computerized analysis of the massive amount of phone tapping the IAO now has the right to perform without a legal warrant.

Futures Markets Applied to Prediction, or FutureMAP, intends to "concentrate on market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events." It will analyze data from the world's economy in an attempt to predict political instability, threats to national security, and in general every major event in the near future. The IAO's stated strategy for this division states that "the markets must also be sufficiently robust to withstand manipulation", possibly suggesting the intention of altering future events to further the goals of the United States.

Genisys code-names the database system which the IAO plans to implement as the center of its information storage and processing. Currently used database systems designed in the 1980s do not have the capacity for the massive amount of data the IAO plans to gather.

Genoa "provides the structured argumentation, decision-making and corporate memory to rapidly deal with and adjust to dynamic crisis management." In essence, the IAO intended this program to make conclusions and decisions based on available information, incorporating human analysis, corporate history, and a structured set of thinking. The IAO finished this research project in fiscal year 2002; there follows Genoa II, which effectively automates the collaboration between government departments.

Human Identification at a Distance, or HumanID, "is to develop automated biometric identification technologies to detect, recognize and identify humans at great distances." This program intends to have the capability of implementing a face and gait identification system effective up to 150 meters at all times by fiscal year 2004. One such program, developed by Georgia Tech at a cost of nearly $1 million, identifies distinctive patterns in human walks via radar. [5]

Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization, or TIDES, aims to detect, translate, summarize, and extract information in speech or text in multiple languages. The IAO expected demonstration of machine capabilities and integration into Total Information Awareness systems in 2003.

Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment, or WAE, focusses on developing automated technology capable of predicting terrorist attacks, identifying predictive indicators by examining individual and group behavior in broad environmental context. The WAE will also develop intervention strategies based on the motivation of specific terrorists.

4 Literature and Movies Critical of Total Information Awareness

The Transparent Society by David Brin, thought-provoking, discusses various scenarios of the future, considering the spread of cheap web-cameras, increases in government security initiatives, and the possible death of encryption if quantum computing becomes reality
Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel by George Orwell depicting a total information awareness society
Minority Report, a story by Philip K. Dick about a society that arrests people for crimes they have yet to commit (made into a movie in 2002)
Brazil, a film by Terry Gilliam depicting an oppressive total information awareness society

5 See also

Combat Zones That See, or CTS, a project to link up all security cameras citywide and "track everything that moves".
Government Information Awareness "acts as a framework for US citizens to construct and analyze a comprehensive database on our government".
LifeLog, "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities. The objective of this 'LifeLog' concept is to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships."

6 External links

The Information Awareness Office's official homepage
Speech by John Poindexter providing an overview of the Information Awareness Office
Critical appraisal of the IAO by the Cato Institute
Articles about TIA/IAO From Warblogging.com
Information about the disapperance of the IAO logo
Outsourcing Big Brother, a report by the Center for Public Integrity, reports that the Information Awareness Office "has hired at least eight private companies to work on the effort."
Pentagon database plan hits snag on Hill, by Declan McCullagh, c|net news
Pentagon Snoopers The New York Times editorial, January 25, 2003.
Unfocused Data-Mining The St. Petersburg Times, January 24, 2003.
Pentagon Defends Surveillance Program The Washington Post, May 20, 2003
The Pentagon's PR Play The Washington Post, May 21, 2003.
K. A. Taipale, Data Mining and Domestic Security: Connecting the Dots to Make Sense of Data, Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy. 5 Colum. Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 2 (December 2003).

U.S. Defense organizations

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1 Introduction