Senate moves to block Pentagon’s anti-terror data mining effort

The Senate voted Thursday to block funding for the controversial Total Information Awareness project until the Bush administration issues a detailed report on its privacy implications.

The TIA project seeks to develop a system to search public and private databases-many containing personal financial and legal information-as well as the Internet for clues that a terrorist attack is being plotted. It has drawn fire from privacy advocates across the political spectrum.

Under an amendment proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., one of the Senate's most vocal TIA opponents, Congress cannot obligate any funds for the project until the attorney general, the Defense secretary and the director of the CIA provide lawmakers with a detailed report on how a TIA system would be used and what effects it could have on people's privacy.

The project's engineers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are testing data-mining tools that can correlate such data as telephone calls, airline ticket purchases and rental car receipts, in the hopes of preventing terrorist attacks.

Wyden assailed the project as "the most far-reaching government surveillance plan in history." He said his amendment, included by unanimous consent in the fiscal 2003 omnibus spending bill the Senate passed Thursday, is a check "on the government's ability to snoop on law-abiding Americans."

DARPA officials object to that characterization of the TIA project. They say controls are being tested to ensure the system wouldn't breach privacy laws.

A House-Senate conference will probably consider Wyden's amendment next. If Congress passes the amendment, within 60 days the Defense and Justice departments and the CIA would have to submit an assessment of TIA's impact on civil rights, as well as a detailed spending plan. The report also would have to assess the likelihood that the TIA system, if built, could provide evidence useful enough to predict terrorists' plans and intentions.

A number of scientists have expressed doubts that the system could work as envisioned. On Thursday, the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society in Washington, wrote a letter to members of Congress urging a thorough assessment of "the technical feasibility and practical reality of the entire program."

One major problem with the proposed TIA plan is that it would search databases that contain errors, said Barbara Simons, co-chair of the association's public policy committee. Names may be misspelled and other information may have been entered incorrectly, raising the possibility that people could be wrongly identified.

Two statistical analyses of TIA, which presumed the system would be used to screen the transactions of a finite number of people at a high rate of accuracy, each reached the same conclusion: The system would incorrectly identify thousands of people as terrorist suspects.

Critics of the project hailed the Senate's action. "It was clear that something like this was going to happen," said Wayne Crews, director of technology studies at the free market Cato Institute in Washington. Crews said that privacy laws prohibit the collection of information TIA seems to envision, and that Congress must address the legal impact of the project.

Even if the Wyden amendment becomes law, funding for TIA could continue if the president declares that submitting a report isn't possible, or that halting work would compromise national security. But Congress would still have to give final approval to any use of the project for domestic purposes.

The amendment doesn't prohibit the use of the TIA for legal military purposes or foreign intelligence operations.