Bush Funds US Spying on Internet Chat Rooms
Michael Hill, AP -- TROY, N.Y. -- Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chat rooms - flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks - are terrorists plotting their next move?The government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program. Mark Rasch, a former head of the Justice Department's computer crimes unit, said such a system would bring the country one step closer to the Pentagon's much-maligned Terrorism Information Awareness program.
Research on that massive data-mining project was halted after an uproar over its impact on privacy.
"It's the ability to gather and analyze massive amounts of data that creates the privacy problem," Rasch said, "even though no individual bit of data is particularly private."
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/10/12/6878231
US still funding powerful data mining tools - Total Information Awareness projects transferred to other agencies.
The Associated Press reports that the US government is still financing research to create powerful software tools that could mine millions of public and private records for information about terrorists, despite last year's controversy over how easily and how often the software might implicate people who have nothing to do with terrorism.
Although Congress eliminated funding for the original project, known as the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program and run by Iran-Contragate figure retired Adm. John Poindexter, AP reports, lawmakers left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known US government office called Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) that has used some of the same researchers as Mr. Poindexter's program.
ARDA, is so secretive it's not listed in the 684-page official compilation of federal departments, agencies and offices, reports Tech Central. ARDA researches and develops computer software and equipment to "intercept and analyze foreign intelligence that is transmitted electronically – and to protect the US methods used to obtain and communicate it."
Michael Hill, AP -- TROY, N.Y. -- Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chat rooms - flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks - are terrorists plotting their next move?The government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program. Mark Rasch, a former head of the Justice Department's computer crimes unit, said such a system would bring the country one step closer to the Pentagon's much-maligned Terrorism Information Awareness program.
Research on that massive data-mining project was halted after an uproar over its impact on privacy.
"It's the ability to gather and analyze massive amounts of data that creates the privacy problem," Rasch said, "even though no individual bit of data is particularly private."
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/10/12/6878231
US still funding powerful data mining tools - Total Information Awareness projects transferred to other agencies.
The Associated Press reports that the US government is still financing research to create powerful software tools that could mine millions of public and private records for information about terrorists, despite last year's controversy over how easily and how often the software might implicate people who have nothing to do with terrorism.
Although Congress eliminated funding for the original project, known as the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program and run by Iran-Contragate figure retired Adm. John Poindexter, AP reports, lawmakers left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known US government office called Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) that has used some of the same researchers as Mr. Poindexter's program.
ARDA, is so secretive it's not listed in the 684-page official compilation of federal departments, agencies and offices, reports Tech Central. ARDA researches and develops computer software and equipment to "intercept and analyze foreign intelligence that is transmitted electronically – and to protect the US methods used to obtain and communicate it."