Canary In a Data Mine

A few items at the local Wal-Mart find their way into your basket--a computer hard drive, a wrench, a discounted Halloween mask, a gallon of lighter fluid, and a CD of The Coup’s album Party Music. You look in your wallet. No cash. You pay with the ATM card. The bored woman at the register asks for your zip code, and, distracted, you give it to her.

Wal-Mart’s streaming data secrets your purchase data to Arlington, Virginia, where it hooks up with a speeding ticket you got at the Canadian border last week and your subscription to The Nation. Next thing you know, two FBI agents are at your door with probable cause to sift through your belongings. They find a small bag of pot your old roommate left behind and a copy of the book "Bomb the Suburbs." Your patriotism is suddenly questioned at headquarters.

This scenario is being painted by even those only moderately fearful of how the new Total Information Awareness program under Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will work with the new, encompassing, Homeland Security Act. TIA’s intended purposes is to catch potential terrorists before they strike. While the moderately fearful have their point, computer-savvy techies say this scenario isn’t likely to happen--yet.

"It’s the Three Stooges Go to Data Mining School," says Paul Hawken, environmental/capitalist and chair of Groxis, a data mining software company.

"The good news is Americans don’t have much to fear soon," Hawken says. "It will take 10 years to get going." In addition, "the brilliant, cutting-edge technology companies won’t touch this," he says. "DARPA’s going to get the second-rate companies."

Those companies, like IBM that Hawken calls "second rate," have repeatedly received government contracts leading to billions of dollars worth of technology that doesn’t work. IBM, for instance, wasted much of a $15 billion contract on upgrading the nation’s aviation system a decade ago.

In late November, Hawken was approached by DARPA with a request to allow the military to license Groxis. Hawken said no. As far as he knows, his company is the only one to publicly decline the millions of dollars involved with licensing data mining software to the government for Total Information Awareness.

"We got a lot of e-mails from companies--even conservative ones--saying, ‘Thank you. Finally someone won’t do something for money.’"

But the rest of those companies, the IBMs of the nation, will be happy to go along with DARPA’s plan. "All those vendors whose stock has crashed in the last few months are rubbing their hands at the tons of pork," said Cory Doctorow, the Electronic Frontier Foundation outreach coordinator.

So far, a traditional technology company, Booz Allen Hamilton, has been awarded a contract by DARPA to start technology integration. Telcordia, a communications company and Cycorp, which has a sort of artificial intelligence product that sorts questions and answers have also been hired, according to DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker.

While those companies might waste taxpayer money, they may still be able to get the job done. Doctorow and others believe the data mining necessary to compile dossiers on the public is feasible. DARPA doesn’t even need supercomputers. It can set up a basement full of white box PCs to crawl through incoming data.

There are two main technical questions. Can software make sense of it in a way for government agencies to use without being overwhelmed by nonsense and can the vast numbers of sources of data agree on ways to talk in the same language?

It’s not simple, but it’s also not very high-tech, according to Doctorow. "It’s like how to get Sears and Macys to agree on a Dewey Decimal system."