Government wants to probe records to find any plots

Privacy watchdogs and civil liberties groups fear a Big Brother-type situation will result.
By CRAIG LINDER
STATES NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- Did you make a $50 purchase on your MasterCard? The government wants to know.
Did you pay last year's taxes on time? The government wants to know.
Did you buy a one-way ticket to Philadelphia? The government wants to know.
Pentagon officials hope to develop a powerful computer program that would allow investigators to sift though millions of records from government and commercial databases as part of the nation's hunt for terrorists.
Total Information Awareness
At the core of the $200 million project, dubbed Total Information Awareness, is the belief that terrorists leave a trail of clues as they plan and execute an attack, but that law-enforcement officials are unable to discern these clues before an attack takes place.
"If terrorist organizations are going to plan and execute attacks against the United States, their people must engage in transactions, and they will leave signatures in this information," John Poindexter, the Pentagon official in charge of the project, said in a speech this summer.
To help investigators pick up on that trail of clues, Pentagon scientists want to develop a single system that could filter though and discern suspicious patterns in government records such as firearms registries and tax returns, as well as private databases such as airline ticket receipts, medical records and bank transaction files.
Fears for privacy
That's a dangerous idea to privacy watchdogs and civil liberties groups. They fear that the Total Information Awareness effort could collect enough information to create a Big Brother-like dossier on law-abiding American citizens.
"In order for it to work, it would need to rewrite the privacy laws of the country today," said Ari Schwartz, the associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "It would turn us into a master surveillance state, overriding years and years of privacy laws."
In some respects, the Total Information Awareness program could rely on a supersize version of the discount club card offered by many supermarkets.
In the same way that grocery stores hope to discover trends in information gathered on what a customer buys, how much he spends, how often he shops and how he pays for his groceries, the Pentagon system could use powerful software operating on largely the same principles to look for suspicious trends or activity across massive databases that are not currently connected.
Once the government compiled the information into a single database -- a process called data mining -- investigators could sift through the data using automated algorithms created to look for predetermined threat patterns.
Pentagon division
Total Information Awareness is being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon division that helped create the Internet and stealth technology.
DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker said the system could help investigators shine a bright light into the shadowy world in which terrorists operate.
"In this ocean of people who are doing everyday things, we need to find the people who are doing everyday things for bad ends," said Walker, who emphasized that the program was in a very early stage of development.
Safeguarding privacy
DARPA official say that strong privacy protections will be included in the final Total Information Awareness system, pointing to information about the project sent to government contractors that included plans for such safeguards.
"More than just making sure that different databases can talk to one another, we need better ways to extract information from those unified databases and to ensure that the private information on innocent citizens is protected," Poindexter said.
The homeland security bill pending before the Senate includes funding for programs such as Total Information Awareness but does not weaken any federal privacy laws, Schwartz said. The House passed the measure this week.