Total Information Awareness
[1][2] Based on the concept of predictive policing, TIA was meant to correlate detailed information about people in order to anticipate and prevent terrorist incidents before execution.
The goal was to integrate components from previous and new government intelligence and surveillance programs, including Genoa, Genoa II, Genisys, SSNA, EELD, WAE, TIDES, Communicator, HumanID and Bio-Surveillance, with data mining knowledge gleaned from the private sector to create a resource for the intelligence, counterintelligence, and law enforcement communities.
[11][12] These components consisted of information analysis, collaboration, decision-support tools, language translation, data-searching, pattern recognition, and privacy-protection technologies.
[17] Universities enlisted to assist with research and development included Berkeley, Colorado State, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Cornell, Dallas, Georgia Tech, Maryland, MIT, and Southampton.
[23] Vast amounts of information were to be collected and analyzed, and the available database technology at the time was insufficient for storing and organizing such enormous quantities of data.
[24] Evidence extraction and link discovery (EELD) developed technologies and tools for automated discovery, extraction and linking of sparse evidence contained in large amounts of classified and unclassified data sources (such as phone call records from the NSA call database, internet histories, or bank records).
were invited to participate in the annual information retrieval, topic detection and tracking, automatic content extraction, and machine translation evaluations run by NIST.
[17] Communicator was to develop "dialogue interaction" technology to enable warfighters to talk to computers, such that information would be accessible on the battlefield or in command centers without a keyboard-based interface.
[33] The University of Southampton's Department of Electronics and Computer Science was developing an "automatic gait recognition" system and was in charge of compiling a database to test it.
[8][12] Health and biological information TIA collected included drug prescriptions,[8] medical records,[39] fingerprints, gait, face and iris data,[12] and DNA.
[40] TIA's Genisys component, in addition to integrating and organizing separate databases, was to run an internal "privacy protection program".
This was intended to restrict analysts' access to irrelevant information on private U.S. citizens, enforce privacy laws and policies, and report misuses of data.
[41] There were also plans for TIA to have an application that could "anonymize" data, so that information could be linked to an individual only by court order (especially for medical records gathered by the bio-surveillance project).
Sharkey applied the phrase to a conceptual method by which the government could sift through massive amounts of data becoming available via digitization and draw important conclusions.
[17] In January 2002 Poindexter was appointed Director of the newly created Information Awareness Office division of DARPA, which managed TIA's development.
[43] The office temporarily operated out of the fourth floor of DARPA's headquarters, while Poindexter looked for a place to permanently house TIA's researchers.
Groove made it possible for analysts from many different agencies to share intelligence data instantly, and linked specialized programs that were designed to look for patterns of suspicious behavior.
[46] On 24 January 2003, the United States Senate voted to limit TIA by restricting its ability to gather information from emails and the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies.
108-7, Division M, § 111(b) passed in February, the Defense Department was given 90 days to compile a report laying out a schedule of TIA's development and the intended use of allotted funds or face a cutoff of support.
[14] Following a scandal in the Department of Defense involving a proposal to reward investors who predicted terrorist attacks, Poindexter resigned from office on 29 August.
[14] On September 30, 2003, Congress officially cut off TIA's funding and the Information Awareness Office (with the Senate voting unanimously against it)[50] because of its unpopular perception by the general public and the media.
As late as September 2004, Basketball was fully funded by the government and being tested in a research center jointly run by ARDA and SAIC.
[1] The American Civil Liberties Union launched a campaign to terminate TIA's implementation, claiming that it would "kill privacy in America" because "every aspect of our lives would be catalogued".
[56] In the 2008 British television series The Last Enemy, TIA is portrayed as a UK-based surveillance database that can be used to track and monitor anybody by putting all available government information in one place.
