My New Total Information Awareness Technique Will Be Totally Unstoppable

By Justin Rood
TPM Muckraker
Oct. 22, 2006

The U.S. government is rebuilding the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, and it's going to be better than ever!

Shane Harris at National Journal tells us today that despite efforts to kill TIA, it has lived on in a quiet corner of the NSA. Now, it's taking form as "Tangram," a program in which former TIA contractors build on existing TIA research to create a new, enhanced form of the program.

Like TIA, Tangram would compile vast databases of information on hundreds of millions of innocent people, including communications records, credit card transactions and travel information, and mine them for patterns of behavior which look suspiciously terroristical.

But check this out! The problem with the old method of data mining, according to Tangram's caretakers, is that they used a "guilt-by-association" model -- that is, it found terror suspects by seeing who was linked to known or suspected terrorists. Tangram tosses that outmoded concept. It can find terrorists even among innocent people with no ties to suspected terrorists!

We can finally catch people who spontaneously decide to hate the United States! Sweet!

Hey, only one problem, though: according to Tangram's keepers, terrorism researchers "cannot readily distinguish the absolute scale of normal behaviors" for innocent people or for terrorists. In other words, no one yet knows how terrorist activity differs from non-terrorist activity.

Cheezit, catching terrorists by monitoring their everyday transactions is going to totally rock -- as soon as we can figure out how a terrorist buys a toaster differently than an innocent person. (They pay cash, and don't buy any bread to go with it?)

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