Thread: TIA is OPERATIONAL! This is your real id biometric future

Congressed had pulled the funding for TIA. Now it is up and running and they are ready to test the deathstar!

Meet your new god. Meet the beast that will be watching you at all times.

W

Homeland Security revives supersnoop

By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 8, 2007

Senator Russell Feingold Roey Yohai (THE WASHINGTON TIMES)
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Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.

The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

The investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy laws, and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq war supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a panel aide said.

The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict terrorist behavior.

Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.

Privacy concerns prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to introduce legislation in January to require that government agencies disclose data-mining practices in regular reports to Congress.

"A serious discussion on the implications of data-mining programs is long overdue," Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, said yesterday. Sen. John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, is also a bill sponsor.

"Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of secret government programs analyzing their personal information. Congress needs to know more about the operational aspects and privacy implications of data-mining programs before these programs are allowed to go forward," Mr. Feingold said.

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not return a call for comment.

Congress also tucked language inside Homeland Security's spending bill in September requiring an investigation by the agency's inspector general, but allowed $40 million in funding to go forward in this year's budget.

"The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on terrorists," the spending bill said. "A prototype is currently available to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens."

According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in March 2003, TIA planned "to use data mining technologies to sift through personal transactions in electronic data to find patterns and associations connected to terrorist threats and activities."

"Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project provoked expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion of privacy of law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the direction of the project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair," the CRS report said.

"While the law enforcement and intelligence communities argue that more sophisticated information gathering techniques are essential to combat today's sophisticated terrorists, civil libertarians worry that the government's increased capability to assemble information will result in increased and unchecked government power, and the erosion of individual privacy," the report said.

ADVISE was initiated in 2003 following the demise of the TIA project.

The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive quantities of information from many different sources" to find "hidden relationships in the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a Homeland Security workshop that outlined this and other technology under development.

The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million "relationships" or connections per hour, says the report, which included an example of how friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be linked by pinging the data.

http://washingtontimes.com/national/200 ... -4382r.htm

Some of you may experience difficulty reading the entire text.

Please let me know if you start off reading it with interest but then detect some problems reading the end or a tendency for your attention level or reading comprehension to balk.

Sorta like something you are seeing but really don't want to see.

It is hard for me to articulate what I'm trying to convey here.

Please tell me if reading this article above feels different than how it feels when you read most other articles.

W

Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.

Apparently, illegal aliens and green card holders get a pass here, just like always.

It's those unreliable US citizens that you've got to keep an eye on.

W: I think I catch your drift....

"The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on terrorists," the spending bill said.

Using statistical pattern recognition techniques to quantify levels of association is one thing. But, extrapolating those findings to predict violent behavior of people that are complete strangers - having infinitely complex histories and lives - seems like a very far stretch to this reader.
(eg. you can say a certain [strong/weak/etc] relationship might exist. You cannot say WHY the relationship might exist without knowing more about that specific individual).

Also, sometimes humans have this funny propensity to do things for no apparently good reason - how does the algorithm account for these effects?

This is what happens when the government doe's not fear the people. Our government will push the this and the North American union right down our throat.

Please tell me if reading this article above feels different than how it feels when you read most other articles.

Yes, I'd say it feels different. Like I'm reading something out of 1984.

Originally Posted by CountFloyd

Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.

Apparently, illegal aliens and green card holders get a pass here, just like always.

It's those unreliable US citizens that you've got to keep an eye on.

Now you can see why they opened the door to illegals banking in the Patriot Act

Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.

I believe that this system combined with the number that will be your unique Facial Recognition Technology identity is the "Mutual electronic security perimeter" of the "North American Community" or North American Union.

When you enter the store to make a purchase, the computers scan your face. Your scan becomes your number. It is matched against the number generated from your Real ID and is added to the massive database about you.

This system is going for almost absolute knowledge and therefore ABSOLUTE POWER.

W

Perhaps future terrorists will be those that resist when taxes are taken from us just to pay the interest on the debts we owe while we receive no government services of quality in return.

W

I just want to make sure everyone has seen this. This was the original Logo for Total Information Awareness TIA back when it was revealed to the public via the DARPA website a few years back.



Notice how the eye is watching America and Western Europe?

W

The sad thing here is the total lack of attention an article like this will get.

I saw this early this morning and posted it on a political site. It received exactly 0 responses.

I saw that it is also posted on FR. It had something like a dozen or so responses the last time I looked.

I doubt that this will get any space in the newspapers, either.

People just refuse to see what's happening right in front of their own eyes.