Total Information Awareness - Outsourced

I'm sure most everyone here is familiar with the Total Information Awareness program originally proposed by Adm. John Poindexter, partially implemented by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Information Awareness Office and allegedly terminated after it came to light in 2003.  I'm also sure most here know that various parts of the program weren't really terminated, only moved to assorted black programs in other agencies.

But what you may not have known is that the whole thing was outsourced to Singapore and they have now rolled out an even bigger badder program than the original TIA.

And who might the guest of honor be at the rollout?  Why Adm. John Poindexter, of course:

Nearly four years after Congress pulled the plug on what critics assailed as an Orwellian scheme to spy on private citizens, Singapore is set to launch an even more ambitious incarnation of the Pentagon's controversial Total Information Awareness program -- an effort to collect and mine data across all government agencies in the hopes of pinpointing threats to national security.

The Singapore prototype of the system -- dubbed Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning, or RAHS -- was rolled out early this week at a conference in the Southeast Asia city-state. Retired U.S. Adm. John Poindexter, the architect of the original Pentagon program, traveled to Singapore to deliver a speech at the unveiling, while backers have already begun quietly touting the system to U.S. intelligence officials.

(emphasis mine)

Singapore is a natual partner in such a venture - they're pretty much the embodiment of the Bush administration's ideal - a veneer of democracy covering a profound authoritarianism.  And while this goes by the name RAHS, this really is Son of TIA:

While different in design from TIA, the RAHS system shares some intellectual roots with the doomed Darpa effort. The two principal consultants for RAHS are John Peterson, of the Virginia-based Arlington Institute, and Dave Snowden, who was previously supported by Poindexter's office within Darpa, and is now the chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based company.

And now that they've built it, the push is on to market it back to our very own little authoritarians in Homeland Security:

That's where the conference in Singapore comes in. The goal of the symposium, which took place Monday and Tuesday, was "to expose this thing to the international world," said the Arlington Institute's Peterson. Officials from the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, New Zealand and Israel were invited to attend.

The conference follows a visit to Washington, D.C., the first week in March by a Singapore delegation to discuss RAHS with U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security officials. The Singaporeans had on their agenda meetings with Charles Allen, DHS' assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis, and Patrick Neary, strategy chief for National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, according to the PR firm hired by the Singapore government to publicize the trip, though the planned meeting with Neary didn't take place. Neither DHS nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would comment on their interest in the program.

But don't worry ... this would never be used to invade your privacy.  It's only meant to protect you from terror ...

•  Tip Jar

  Ah, the wonders of globalization!

  by jrooth on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 06:27:16 PM PDT

  •  Yo... Broken Link...

    I got a content not found for:

    the whole thing was outsourced to Singapore

    This link seems to work however...

    http://www.wired.com/...

    by kraant on Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 01:05:02 AM PDT

    •  Thanks

      Fixing it.

      by jrooth on Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 06:57:36 AM PDT

•  You can't trust Republicans with Natl Security.

  They are entirely too corrupt and incompetent to protect us.

  by Scout Finch on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 06:29:26 PM PDT

  •  They think

    Normal decent and patriotic Americans are the real threat to "national security". They  think that anyone who opposes them and their corrupt fascist agenda is an enemy of the United States as Repubics believe the country and their interests are one and the same.

    This is exactly how they think with their sick and twisted minds. If you aren't a podwashed Repubic supporter then you are a traitor and therefore a threat that will be eliminated sooner or later.

    This whole bullshit scheme is to keep tabs on us- all the easier to disappear or destroy us in other ways, at their whim.

    by Dave925 on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 07:10:59 PM PDT

•  So how secure is this sucker?

  Does the government really want to give access to all of our data to some company in Singapore?  All it would take would be one or two people to bring the whole government crashing down.

  by Webster on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 06:52:51 PM PDT

  •  Now, now ...

    Our good friends in Singapore wouldn't build any back doors into a system they were selling to us ...

    by jrooth on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 07:05:59 PM PDT

    •  I didn't mean back doors

      I meant one or two people to get the training, get the jobs and have actual access to read/write across all the government agencies.  They could find a person who has some money, maybe has made a few calls to Congressmen along with reading certain blogs.  Find the profile of people who may run for office.  If they match a certain profile, you could add/delete an arrest in their record or delete a tax return.

      by Webster on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 11:37:04 PM PDT

•  John Poindexter Should Be a Controlled Commodity

  ....subject to import/export restrictions and special handling requirements that minimize the risk his very existence poses to civilian populations.

  by greenskeeper on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 07:27:12 PM PDT

  •  Traitor

    Poindexter should be in prison, but he isn't.  Grr.  He slipped in paperwork which Reagan signed, being in his dotage - arrghhhh! - blood spurting from ears, just a sec.

    OK, I'm back.  Singapore is a lovely place where enforced sexual slavery does NOT exist.  Nor, indeed, does it condone complete censorship - much less violent suppression of dissent.  It is an example of the virtues of Free Trade, a shining example of partnership between business and the forces of Freedom.  

    Blood spurting through eyes.

    We need Singapore.  They have enormous dollar reserves which could cause a world-wide economic crisis if they decided to dump dollars in favor of euros.

    by willb48 on Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 03:02:38 AM PDT

•  Oh the Irony, remember this?

  Wolfowitz: �Iraq War Was About Oil�
   By George Wright
   The Guardian

   Wednesday 04 June 2003

   Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war.

   The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil.
  
   The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

   Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

  by gabbardd on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 07:59:01 PM PDT

•  which congressmen sponsored pulling the plug

  Nearly four years after Congress pulled the plug

  WHich congressmen sponsored the pulling of the TIA plug?

  Are they still in congress?

  And most importantly, would these congressmen be interested that Son of TIA is back in the USA, being marketed to these current and former exec branch operatives?

  Who else would like to write a little note to these congressmen?  You can't win it unless you're in it.

  by mrcoder on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 08:09:05 PM PDT

•  The death of TIA

  is here:

  Congressional Record: September 24, 2003 (House)
  H8500-H8550
  CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 2658, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2004 (House Report 108-283)
  [TIA-related excerpts]

  [...]

  Sec. 8131. (a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this or any other Act may be obligated for the Terrorism Information Awareness Program: Provided, That this limitation shall not apply to the program hereby authorized for Processing, analysis, and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence, as described in the Classified Annex accompanying the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2004, for which funds are expressly provided in the National Foreign Intelligence Program for counterterrorism foreign intelligence purposes. (b) None of the funds provided for Processing, analysis, and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence shall be available for deployment or implementation except for:
  (1) lawful military operations of the United States conducted outside the United States; or
  (2) lawful foreign intelligence activities conducted wholly overseas, or wholly against non-United States citizens. (c) In this section, the term "Terrorism Information Awareness Program" means the program known either as Terrorism Information Awareness or Total Information Awareness, or any successor program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or any other Department or element of the Federal Government, including the individual components of such Program developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

  [...]

  JOINT EXPLANATORY STATEMENT

  [...]

  Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA)

  The conferees agree with the Senate position which eliminates funding for the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The conferees are concerned about the activities of the Information Awareness Office and direct that the Office be terminated immediately. The only research projects previously under the jurisdiction of the Information Awareness Office that may continue under DARPA are: Bio-Event Advanced Leading Indicator Recognition Technology, Rapid Analytic Wargaming, Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment, and Automated Speech and Text Exploitation in Multiple Languages (including Babylon and Symphony). The conferees find these programs are not components of TIA for the purposes of section 8131. The conference agreement does not restrict the National Foreign Intelligence Program from using processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence purposes.

  Is TIA back from the dead?  Who gave them a waiver to bring TIA back to the USA and spend taxpayer money to buy it?

  by mrcoder on Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 08:16:12 PM PDT

  •  This is an easy one.

    none of the funds provided for Processing, analysis, and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence shall be available for deployment or implementation except for:
    (1) lawful military operations of the United States conducted outside the United States; or
    (2) lawful foreign intelligence activities conducted wholly overseas, or wholly against non-United States citizens.

    See? Just move it outside the US and let Congress prove it's unlawful.  If I loved money more than my country, I could run the Republican Party.

    I don't think they buy it, I think they use it.  It'll be a service contracted by a small executive branch agency.

    by Webster on Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 12:23:36 AM PDT

  •  Is TIA back from the dead?

    It never died.

    by mataliandy on Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 08:41:10 AM PDT

    •  yea, you are right

      The law simply required it to be used for military operations conducted outside the US.

      What does it mean to run a TIA system on an internet host which sits outside US soil, but which monitors internet traffic from all over the globe?

      It means the law is not going to stop TIA at all.

      by mrcoder on Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 10:32:32 AM PDT

      •  page 1 of the disappeared article

        The Wired.com site published the Son of TIA article on March 22 2007.

        The article is now gone.  It has been removed from that site as of March 27.  Several much older sureillance articles remain on that site, however.

        Very interesting....

        In google's cache there still is a copy of page 1 of the 2 page article.  The 2nd page is completely gone.

        Here is an excerpt:

        By Sharon Weinberger| Also by this reporter
        12:00 PM Mar, 22, 2007

        Nearly four years after Congress pulled the plug on what critics assailed as an Orwellian scheme to spy on private citizens, Singapore is set to launch an even more ambitious incarnation of the Pentagon's controversial Total Information Awareness program -- an effort to collect and mine data across all government agencies in the hopes of pinpointing threats to national security.

        The Singapore prototype of the system -- dubbed Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning, or RAHS -- was rolled out early this week at a conference in the Southeast Asia city-state. Retired U.S. Adm. John Poindexter, the architect of the original Pentagon program, traveled to Singapore to deliver a speech at the unveiling, while backers have already begun quietly touting the system to U.S. intelligence officials.

        In 2003, plans for Total Information Awareness, or TIA, sparked outrage among privacy advocates. TIA was one of several programs run out of the Information Awareness Office at Darpa, the Pentagon's advanced research projects agency. Fueling public indignation was news that Poindexter, President Reagan's national security adviser and a key figure in the '80s Iran-Contra scandal, was in charge of the office.

        Facing an avalanche of bad publicity, Poindexter resigned in August 2003. Congress pulled funding for the program, and TIA and related programs were either terminated or moved to other agencies. The Information Awareness Office was closed.

        But Poindexter's vision never lost currency among advocates of data mining, particularly in Singapore, a country that mixes elements of democratic governance with authoritarian rule.

        While different in design from TIA, the RAHS system shares some intellectual roots with the doomed Darpa effort. The two principal consultants for RAHS are John Peterson, of the Virginia-based Arlington Institute, and Dave Snowden, who was previously supported by Poindexter's office within Darpa, and is now the chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based company.

        Peterson, a futurist, describes RAHS as a system that monitors multiple feeds of data -- both open and classified -- to detect possible threats. "Essentially it's a strategic tool that ties together every one of the agencies in a government into a large network that is constantly scanning the horizon looking for weak signals that point toward the possibility of a significant event that would have important implications for Singapore," he said.

        Snowden's work at Cognitive Edge concentrates on automated software to detect such "weak signals" that would normally be passed over by human analysts. "Instead of having analysts trawl through huge amounts of data to decide what it means, the data is tagged very quickly, then they decide what the patterns in the metadata mean," said Snowden.

        While terrorism is a driving factor for RAHS, it was the SARS epidemic -- which crippled Singapore's economy -- that prompted interest in the technology, according to Patrick Nathan, deputy director of the Singapore National Security Coordination Center. "We are studying the application of the RAHS concepts and tools to the social, and economic and financial domains," Nathan wrote in an e-mail interview.

        Whether terrorism or epidemics, Singapore's rapid acceptance of data mining is a breath of fresh air to the system's designers. "Singapore is small and has this intrinsic sense of paranoia," Peterson said.

        "I think we would have been stuck in Darpa doing experimental research for another 15 years without anyone making it operational," Snowden said. "Singapore just walked around and saw what they liked, and said, 'The hell with it, let's just make it operational,' which is much more pragmatic and forward-thinking."

        While the controversial Darpa efforts were never more than research, RAHS is set to launch with five different agencies in September. Eventually, RAHS would extend across Singapore's entire government, a plan that makes it the most ambitious data-snooping effort in the world.
        ...

        by mrcoder on Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 10:50:50 AM PDT