Tracking Down TIA

An interesting account, whose veracity I am not necessarily vouching for (it seems rather thinly sourced for the depth of its accusations), of the afterlife of Total Information Awareness on an Arlington, VA, street. (The publication, Capital Hill Blue, sells itself as a place for old newspaper men to run "the stories their outfits don't have the guts to publish," which could either be a sign of brave truthtelling or reckless taletelling.)

Regardless, some excerpts:

[A] nondescript office building at 3701 Fairfax Drive…houses the Pentagon?s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency?s Total Information Awareness Program, the ?big brother? program Congress thought it killed.
…..
Despite Congressional action cutting funding, and the resignation of the program?s controversial director, retired admiral John Poindexter, DARPA?s TIA program is alive and well and prying into the personal business of Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

?When Congress cut the funding, the Pentagon ? with administration approval ? simply moved the program into a ?black bag? account,? says a security consultant who worked on the DARPA project. ?Black bag programs don?t require Congressional approval and are exempt from traditional oversight.?

DARPA also hired private contractors to fill many of the roles in the program, which helped evade detection by Congressional auditors. Using a private security firm like Cantwell, instead of the Federal Protective Service, helped keep TIA off the radar screen.
…..
When news of TIA first surfaced in 2002….citizens? watchdog groups and some members of Congress took a second look. The uproar that followed led to the resignation of Poindexter, who had lied to Congress during the Iran-Contra investigation, and the elimination of funding for TIA.

But Congress left the door open by supplying DARPA with research funding to develop data mining alternatives to TIA. Instead, the Bush administration instructed the Pentagon to move TIA into the convert area of black bag operations and Congress was cut out of the loop.
…….
When Congress voted to cut the funded, the operation at 3701 Fairfax Drive should have shut down and Arlington County should have returned the officers assigned there to normal duty. However, the officers remained in place and additional security was added to the detail.

According to construction records on file in the Arlington County building and zoning office, more than 20 high-speed data lines have been installed at the location in the last 18 months. Microwave data antennas are also installed on the roof.

Pentagon spokesmen refuse to discuss what is happening in the building, citing "national security" as the reason.
…..TIA still exists and still watches Americans 24/7 from the office building on Fairfax Drive in Arlington. Although employees who work in the building are supposed to keep their presence there a secret, they regularly sport their DARPA id badges around their necks when eating at restaurants near the building. The straps attached to the badges are printed with ?DARPA? in large letters.

?Yeah, they?re the spooks who work in the building over there,? says Ernie, the counterman at a deli near 3701 Fairfax Drive. ?If this is how they keep secrets, I guess we should really be worried.?

Comments

[thoreau]

Could Reason send a complimentary copy of the recent issue to the TIA project, complete with a photo of their building and personalized ads?

I realize that the article on privacy in there is far from an anti-TIA polemic, but I think there would still be some good irony in the gesture.

[Ayn_Randian]

It would be pretty disturbing if it is true...

Brian, isn't a bit disingenous to say you don't really know what to think and still give the article generous coverage?

[Ken Hagler]

This got covered in February:

http://www.warblogging.com/archives/000803.php

[rst]

TIA or not, a single "nondescript" office building with 20 high speed lines coming into it is most likely engaged in data mining. Depends on what kind of lines they are. If they're OC48, I recommend we storm the place and burn it down now, because if they've got 20 high end high speed lines, then they most certainly *ARE* mining, and in a big way. That's like 40 Gbps of bandwidth.

I pray it gets hacked and DoS'ed, whatever it is in there. Those fuckers need to learn that the door swings both ways.

[Phil]

Capitol Hill Blue? Isn't that the outfit that scammed by the fake CIA agent?

Yep.

[KentInDC]

I live about three blocks from that building and a neighbor told me the same stuff about it a few weeks ago. I don't keep up with what goes on in my neighborhood so I was probably the last to know. I can't say that I even gave it much thought until it appeared in this H&R posting.

[Call me snake]

Yes, the very same "black bag" accounts also fund the dreaded "black helicopter" wing of the CIA. Mr X. explained this for Jim Garrison on the park bench in "JFK"...Come on, people!!

Also, Kevin Bacon told me that "Ernie the deli guy" is really a Saudi double agent!! Don't worry about the thin sourcing, Brian: Evidence/facts tend to weaken approx. 98% of all conspiracy theories.

However my laptop and office is bugged, I can't continue typing.

[Call me snake]

Yes, the very same "black bag" accounts also fund the dreaded "black helicopter" wing of the CIA. Mr X. explained this for Jim Garrison on the park bench in "JFK"...Come on, people!!

Also, Kevin Bacon told me that "Ernie the deli guy" is really a Saudi double agent!! Don't worry about the thin sourcing, Brian: Evidence/facts tend to weaken approx. 98% of all conspiracy theories.

However my laptop and office is bugged, I can't continue typing.

[Ted]

Brian, you did a good job of editing the extract, because you deleted the insane accusation that every pay-per-view porn movie order is forwarded to the Department of Justice pornography division that might have caused us to ignore the piece entirely.

And, out of curiosity, how much bandwidth would be required to record every cell-phone conversation, as the story alleges? Even if computers identify only 1% of cell-phone conversations as needing followup analysis, and the average American only has 1 minute of cell-phone conversations a day (a likely underestimate), that's 3 million minutes a day, or 10,000 Americans working 35-hour workweeks secretly doing nothing but listening to cell-phone conversations. How are they all fitting in a 70,000-sq-foot building?

DARPA's presence at 3701 Fairfax is such a secret that numerous DARPA reps give that as their address when they give public talks that are publicized on the web. Try googling 3701 Fairfax.

[Ken Layne]

Yeah, Doug Thompson got screwed by a phony source a year ago, and Capitol Hill Blue quickly 'fessed up to the screwing. If only the NYT would be so honest about how Chalabi has been conning them for a dozen years. (Imagine Judith Miller writing what Thompson wrote: "I was wrong. I'm sorry.")

The "conned big time" correction is pretty interesting reading. (Linked above in Phil's comment.) It's also tough to figure out what was really *wrong* about the phony source story:

On Tuesday, we ran a story headlined "White House admits Bush wrong about Iraqi nukes." For the first time, Wilkinson said he was willing to go on the record and told a story about being present, as a CIA contract consultant, at two briefings with Bush. He said he was retired now and was fed up and wanted to go public.

"He (Bush) said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said in our story. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."

A reliable spook -- known to various GOP pols --feeds Thompson all sorts of solid leads over twenty years, and then vanishes after one is said to be false. And the "false" story then makes it to CNN and a zillion web pages. Sounds like somebody in intelligence was sick of the Chalabi version and wanted to make Bush suffer. Well, it worked!

Also on Capitol Hill Blue: This weirdly disturbing June 4 piece on "Bush's erratic behavior" since the war went sour. I wish Will Ferrell was still on SNL to act out this story.

(I've met Thompson, as has Reason's "boy intern" Matt Welch. Doug's a smart, nice guy & has been publishing Capitol Hill Blue for 10 years.)

[TotalInformationTheft]

I don't know whether TIA is still running or not, but I am pretty certain Doug Thompson and Teresa Hampton are thieves and plagiarists.

From "their" article:

While TIA allows the government to snoop on American citizens, experts in the data mining field say it won?t help fight terrorism.

"Terrorism is an adaptive problem,? says Herb Edelstein, president of data-mining company Two Crows. ?It's pretty unlikely the next terrorist attack will be people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.?

Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, agrees.

?Data mining is good for the purpose of increasing sales and figuring out where to place products in stores,? he says. ?This is very different from figuring out if these products are going to be used for terrorist activities.?

Other experts say the chances for mistakes are huge.

?With meaningful pattern recognition, the order of magnitude of errors from inferences is huge, something like ten to the third (power),? says Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and the chairman of information mapping software company Groxis. ?There would be an incalculable expense to monitor a thousand wrong hits for one correct inference.?

DARPA tried to interest Groxis in becoming part of the TIA project but the company declined, saying the project was neither feasible nor ethical. Hawken says he knows people with the National Security Agency who refused to work on TIA because of ethical concerns.

Compare to a Wired News article in Dec 2002:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56620,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2

"The kind of things they are looking for are hard to find," said Herb Edelstein, president of data-mining company Two Crows. "Terrorism is an adaptive problem. It's pretty unlikely the next terrorist attack will be people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.

"The project is not going to have near-term contributions to the war on terrorism. It's not clear this is an economically valuable way to fight terrorism."

Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, also has doubts.

"Data mining is good for the purpose of increasing sales and figuring out where to place products in stores," he said. "This is very different from figuring out if these products are going to be used for terrorist activities."

Incorrect guesses present problems, too.

"With meaningful pattern recognition, the order of magnitude of errors from inferences is huge, something like ten to the third (power)," said Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and the chairman of information mapping software company Groxis. "There would be an incalculable expense to monitor a thousand wrong hits for one correct inference."

In fact, Hawken said, Groxis spurned, on principle, an offer from Poindexter's group to get involved in the project.