Cybersurveillance System Being Built

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Defense has begun developing a system that will use a variety of information technologies to sort through commercial and private databases and information gathered through surveillance, looking for patterns that reveal terrorist activities.

The program has been established under the Information Awareness Office within the DOD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Seeking Patterns

The IAO's Web site says terrorism is the most serious asymmetric threat facing the United States. This threat is characterized by groups of people loosely organized in shadowy networks, which are difficult to identify and define. The IAO plans to develop technology that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks and their plans, and will potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats, according to the agency.

To carry this out, the research must promote "sharing, collaborating, and reasoning to convert nebulous data to knowledge and actionable options," says an agency statement.

The IAO intends to build a prototype using a number of technologies. Among the technologies being tapped are collaboration over TCP/IP networks, large distributed repositories with dynamic schemas that can be changed interactively, foreign language machine translation and speech recognition, biometric signatures, pattern matching and anomalous pattern detection, and human network analysis and behavior model building engines.

Military and investigative agencies are exploring a number of creative ways to identify security threats.

For example, the CIA has helped fund work by a company called Systems Research and Development, which developed a database that uses fuzzy logic to identify unapparent relationships between people. A version of the technology is employed by casinos that try to detect relationships between staff and known cheaters. The same approach could help identify potential terrorists or supporters, investigators say.

Privacy Considered

The problem of terrorists is more complex than problems the United States has faced before, says John Poindexter, director of the IAO and former national security adviser.

He has described the DOD system as one that will allow counterterrorism officials the use of "transformational" technology to sift through almost unimaginably large amounts of data to find a discernible "signal" indicating terrorist activity or planning. The tools also would give analysts a way to represent visually what that information means. The system would include the technology to identify people at a distance based on known details about their faces and gaits.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has reportedly funded $200 million for the project, which Poindexter said would take years to build. It will include privacy safeguards, but it is up to Congress to set those limits, Poindexter said.

Poindexter was national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, but lost his job over his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. He is disliked by privacy advocates. Last April, after becoming associated with the IAO, Poindexter was awarded a "Lifetime Menace Award" by Privacy International. The organization annually gives Big Brother Awards to individuals, companies, and programs considered to have damaged civil liberties, freedom, and privacy.