DHS Plans Broad Info Grab (Return of Total Information Awareness Program)

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"According to reports, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is
developing a program to collect and search a wide array of personal,
public and classified information, similar to a program killed by
Congress in 2002. The Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization,
Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) program would implement a
massive data mining program to prevent terrorist attacks; the
program, however, continues to lack the necessary oversight structure
and procedures to protect privacy and safeguard civil liberties.

The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that DHS is actively
developing the ADVISE program, despite Congress having little
knowledge of it. DHS is allocating $50 million in funding this year
to develop the data mining tool that will store massive amounts of
information, including buying habits, travel records, criminal
records, intelligence reports, and information gleaned from public
news sources such as blogs and traditional sources like CNN.
According to a DHS report, the technology will draw connections
between persons, determining who is related to whom, who works with
whom, who lives close to whom, and who is associated with what
organization/s. It will also flag suspicious behavior patterns and
form the foundational structure for other more specifically targeted
programs, like the Biodefense Knowledge Center, whose goal it is
to "integrate disparate components in order to anticipate, prepare
for, prevent, detect, respond to, and attribute biological threats."

This is not the first time the federal government has sought to
establish a comprehensive data mining program. The Total Information
Awareness (TIA) program, developed by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2002, bares a close resemblance to DHS's
ADVISE program. The program was quickly shut down by Congress amid
wide-spread privacy concerns, despite DARPA's attempt to assuage such
concerns by renaming the program Terrorism Information Awareness. TIA
would have been able to store and retrieve personal information,
including data pertaining to people's health records, travel plans,
buying habits, educational records, with few restrictions to protect
privacy and ensure citizen's Fourth Amendment rights related to
searches and seizures. The plan was viewed by many as a Big Brother-
like attempt to store all existing data and monitor the public for
suspicious behavior.

The U.S. intelligence agencies have developed over the last 50 years
in the context of the Cold War, when the United States faced a finite
number of threats from an identifiable number of sources and
locations. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 forced a dramatic shift
in intelligence collection methodology and priorities. No longer does
the country face a finite number of threats, and no longer are the
locations and sources of threats clearly identifiable. Hence, greater
emphasis is now placed on increasing the amount of potentially
pertinent information collected and on drawing connections between
disparate, seemingly innocuous bits of data."

http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/3298/1/1?TopicID=1

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DHS_Watch/message/2