How Big Brother Became (Artificially) Intelligent
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How Big Brother Became (Artificially) Intelligent |
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DARPA Total Information Awareness Program is planning to link many government and commercial databases and use data mining to find threatening patterns. Will it reduce the threat of further terrorist attacks or will it erode our privacy even further?
In one of the last year's articles published just a few days after the tragic events of Sept. 11th, we described various AI-related high-tech tools for disaster prevention and recovery. We also introduced various concerns surrounding Echelon, a global system of electronic eavesdropping that is thought to be used for commercial purposes as well as military spying. It monitors millions of communications, using advanced technologies like voice recognition, voiceprint identification and information extraction to target those of interest. Back then, it was (probably?) the biggest and the most advanced system of its kind in the world. But just a few weeks ago, Pentagon formally launched a new research project devoted to sifting every electronic trail generated in the USA to hunt down terrorists.
The goal of the DARPA Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists and decipher their plans and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts. The scale of this project is dazzling: it aims for the development of systems that will be capable of crawling through the vast quantities of data generated by US civilians in their daily lives: ATM receipts, airline tickets, telephone calls, banking records, emails, Web site visits, etc. You may look at it as the prototype of "PreCrime", a fictional law enforcement office that arrests people before they commit a crime in Spielberg's movie "Minority Report". An excellent Salon.com article describes how the government might "connect the dots" from the disparate efforts of 19 men as the makings of the plot they were to execute on Sept. 11. That's why this project will collect and analyze mountains of personal data in the hope of spotting the sort of "suspicious" behavior that preceded the attacks.
Other government agencies are already using similar, smaller scale surveillance systems to collect and analyze personal information. FBI's Carnivore aims to "employ new technology to lawfully obtain important information while providing enhanced privacy protection." But as Assistant Director John E. Collingwood points in one of his memos, "Carnivore does not snoop through every Internet communication, does not spit out everyone's e-mail, and is not an unrestrained Internet wiretap." However, things are changining quickly and the bureau's antiquated computer systems will be improved in the near future. FBI director Robert Mueller described his organization as "years behind where it should be in terms of having the technological infrastructure." Going further, "...it would have been very nice if at some point in time I could say that you put into our computer system a request for anything relating to flight schools, for instance, and have every report in the last 10 years that had been done that mentions flight schools or flight training and the like kicked out. We do not have that capability now. We have to have that capability. And, beyond that, we ought to have the artificial intelligence that ... doesn't require us to query it, but automatically looks at those patterns. And that's the type of technology we need to enhance our analytical capability."
TIA program aims to produce just this type of technology. It's five-year goal is the "total reinvention of technologies for storing and accessing information ... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes." It will require the development of software so that information from decades-old remote databases can be found and accessed as easily as a document stored on your local hard drive. Among other exotic technologies, it will employ face recognition to track potential suspects caught by CCTV cameras on motorway toll booths and police speed traps. And, just to begin with, data mining, information retrieval and knowledge discovery techniques will have to be radically improved. DARPA already begun awarding contracts for the design and implementation of several subsystems, and AI researchers will have a lot of work to do in the following years.
Starting with the appointment of John Poindexter, a former national security adviser, as a head of the project, this whole concept generated a great deal of controversy. He was found guilty of conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Iran-Contra affair, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. Their undeniably creepy logo of an eye at the top of a pyramid watching the world, with the slogan Scientia est Potentia (Knowledge is Power), surely didn't ease the anxieties. John Markoff of the New York Times notes how TIA "will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant. Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization." On top of all that, the whole thing is highly controversial even as a scientific endeavor. It is questionable how many identifiable pattern of behavior associated with terrorists can be found even with the improved data mining algorithms. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and numerous other privacy and civil libertarian groups have lined up in opposition to the TIA program.
TIA is an Orwellian concept, but many giant international outsourcing companies are already working with our most private data. As this Slashdot post says, start thinking about which company will be hosting all that TIA data on your personal lives, and you can see why Microsoft is not your biggest enemy by a long shot... Privacy International has a great article with more details on that topic.