Defense officials lament lost data-mining opportunities

Congress' decision to terminate funding for the Defense Department's Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA) program has cast a pall over other, potentially useful data-mining applications, Defense officials told their Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee (TAPAC) on Thursday.

One halted program involves attempts to identify suicide bombers attacking U.S. interests overseas. Deputy Defense Undersecretary Sue Payton said such restrictions were "absolutely" a significant impediment in failing to prevent Thursday's suicide bombing in Istanbul, Turkey.

Another top official shed light on the airline-passenger profiling system that an Army contractor developed with personal data from JetBlue Airways. Using an hypothesis developed by studying the data, the project identified terrorists with 83 percent accuracy, said Thomas Killion, the Army's chief scientist and acting deputy assistant secretary for research and technology.

But as a result of privacy concerns raised by the use of the data without customer consent, the Army's inspector general is investigating the matter, Killion said. "We are not pursuing additional applications partly because of privacy" concerns, he said in an interview.

Payton outlined elements of a program that she has supervised in her department-wide position responsible for advanced systems and concepts. The program aims to assemble information on potential suicide bombers by weaving together intelligence information from Defense commands with that from international police organization like Interpol.

Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer and member of TAPAC, asked Payton how Defense activities outside the United States would be circumscribed by privacy concerns about U.S. citizens. "If we uncover the name of American citizens involved, or coincidentally associated with a terrorist, we would have to be able to figure out how to handle that information on the U.S. citizen, even though the primary [names] in the database are not of U.S. citizens," Payton replied.

She said that "what happened in Istanbul" would have provided "dots" to connect information leading Defense officials to thwart other bombings -- "who is in buildings, what are the financial records, what are people buying, what is the movement in and out of certain facilities by people."

"I have been told to put this on hold because there was a big of fog about what we were allowed to do in this department," she said. "I do lose some sleep over this."

In addition to building a model for analyzing potential terrorism, the Army's passenger-profiling project also succeeded in segmenting many JetBlue travelers into five groups: "short-trippers" (15 percent), "short notice/short stay" (25 percent), "high spenders" (17 percent), "stranded" or frequent one-way travelers (23 percent), and "non-descript" (20 percent).

The profiles emerged from linking 2.2 million trip records with demographic data assembled by Acxiom, Killion said. The Army does not have the data, and he told the committee that he does not know whether the contractors deleted it.

Although all the programs associated with TIA were de-funded by Congress, TAPAC has been instructed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to continue its efforts because of continued interest in the privacy implications of data mining, committee Chairman Newton Minnow said.