FC: ACLU says Bush administration must come clean on TIA project

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

New ACLU Report Specifies Questions Needing Answers
About Total Information Awareness Cyber-Surveillance System
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, May 16, 2003
Contact: Gabe Rottman
(202) 675-2312
WASHINGTON - In anticipation of the impending deadline for the Pentagon's 
required report to Congress on its Total Information Awareness (TIA) 
super-surveillance system, the American Civil Liberties Union today 
released its own report posing a series of questions that need to be 
answered before Congress can make an informed decision on whether to 
continue funding the hi-tech spy program.
"The Pentagon's report will not be complete unless it comes completely 
clean about the capabilities, effectiveness, potential for misuse, and 
impact on privacy that this program would have," said Barry Steinhardt, 
Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, which authored the 
report.  "We don't see how this massive data-mining system could even 
work.  Government boondoggles don't make us safer."
The release of the ACLU's document comes shortly before the Department of 
Defense is required to submit a report to Congress mandated three months 
ago by legislation, introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and passed 
unanimously as an amendment to an omnibus spending bill, which stopped 
development of the system unless the Pentagon provided lawmakers a report 
disclosing specific details about how TIA would be used.
The main points that the ACLU report contends the Pentagon must address 
include:
*How Americans can remain free when their every transaction is opened up to 
potential government scrutiny;
*How the system will be effective in the face of a false positive rate that 
even under the most optimistic assumptions will reach crippling levels, and 
other problems;
*The TIA's technological capabilities, including whether it could work with 
one giant, centralized database, and whether there would be any limit to 
the number of databases to which it could connect;
*Whether the system will be able to do true data-mining, or only more 
limited "query-based" searches;
*Why it makes a difference, as the government has been suggesting, that the 
TIA database would be distributed rather than centralized;
*How the bedrock American principle of "individualized suspicion" will be 
maintained in the face of a system designed to guess about who might be a 
suspect; and,
*How TIA is likely to evolve over time given the well-established 
historical tendency for such programs to expand once they are established.
"Americans and their representatives in Congress deserve to know just what 
it is they're signing up for if they decide to let this program go 
forward," said Jay Stanley, Communications Director of the Technology and 
Liberty Program.
The transactional data that the Pentagon itself acknowledged planning to 
mine includes financial, travel, education, and housing records, as well as 
medical histories and "communications."  Regardless of the system's 
potential effectiveness in catching terrorists, which is disputed by the 
ACLU and - significantly - many technical experts, the prevailing public 
concern is that TIA, as initially envisioned would undoubtedly be, as 
conservative columnist William Safire called it, a "super-snoop's dream."
The ACLU's report on the TIA program can be found at:
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=12650&c=206




-------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/
Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------