United States Department of Defense |
No. 060-03
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IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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February 7, 2003
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TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS (TIA) UPDATE
The Department of Defense will establish two boards to provide
oversight of the Total Information Awareness Project, the program
designed to develop tools to track terrorists. The two boards,
an internal oversight board and an outside advisory committee,
will work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),
as it continues its research. These boards will help ensure that
TIA develops and disseminates its products to track terrorists
in a manner consistent with U.S. constitutional law, U.S. statutory
law, and American values related to privacy.
The TIA internal oversight board will oversee and monitor the
manner in which terrorist tracking tools are transitioned for real
world use. This board will establish policies and procedures for
use within DoD of the TIA-developed tools and will establish protocols
for transferring these capabilities to entities outside DoD. A
primary focus of the board will be to ensure that the TIA-developed
tools to track terrorists will be used only in accordance with
existing privacy protection laws and policies. The board, which
is expected to hold its first meeting by the end of February 2003,
will be composed of senior DoD officials.
The outside advisory board will be convened as a federal advisory
committee and will comply with all the legal and regulatory requirements
for such bodies. The committee will advise the Secretary of Defense
on the range of policy and legal issues that are raised by the
development and potential application of advanced technology to
help identify terrorists before they act.
Members of the outside advisory board are Newton Minow (chairman),
director of the Annenberg Washington Program and the Annenberg
Professor of Communications Law and Policy at Northwestern University;
Floyd Abrams, renowned civil rights attorney; Zoe Baird, president
Markle Foundation; Griffin Bell, former U.S. Attorney General and
Court of Appeals judge; Gerhard Casper, president emeritus for
Stanford University and Professor of Law; William T. Coleman, Jr.,
former secretary of transportation; and Lloyd Cutler, former White
House Counsel.
DARPA is continuing its research into whether advanced technologies
can be used to help identify terrorist planning activities. This
technology development program was established under the name Total
Information Awareness (TIA) and is designed to catch terrorists
before they strike. Under the rubric of TIA, DARPA is attempting
to develop three categories of tools - language translation, data
search and pattern recognition, and advanced collaborative and
decision support tools. The research conducted under TIA will provide
the tools for obtaining information pertaining to activities of
terrorists, and if connected together, this information could alert
authorities before terrorists' plans are carried out. While the
research to date is promising, TIA is still only a concept.
Development of these anti-terrorism tracking tools would allow
the agencies to better execute their missions. TIA does not plan
to create a gigantic database. Further, TIA has not ever collected
or gathered and is not now collecting or gathering any intelligence
information. This is and will continue to be the responsibility
of the US foreign intelligence/counterintelligence agencies, which
operate under various legal and policy restrictions with congressional
oversight. This technology development program in no way alters
the authority or responsibility of the intelligence community.
Furthermore, TIA has never collected, and has no plan or intent
to collect privately held consumer data on U.S. citizens. It is
a research program designed to catch terrorists before they strike.
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