Massive US Data Collection System to Monitor Blogosphere
Posted on February 8, 2006
The Christian Science Monitor has an article about a new U.S. data collection system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) that will sweep the Internet and collect information from news, blogs and emails.
The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.ADVISE uses algorithms to find keywords and patterns. It can check blog bursts and blog discussions to see if they are terrorists or just bloggers blogging.The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.
But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.The blogosphere alone is full of so much information that one would suspect the government will end up investigating many useless dead ends. The email part of ADVISE sounds like a serious invasion of privacy. There are also already tools available to search many of the publicly available blogs. If ADVISE somehow looks at private passworded blogs that would also be very disconcerting. And there is also the privacy issue of the government compiling information from multiple sources about individuals. The article also addressed this:For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.
Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later.The article cites Mr. Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as writing that ADVISE "looks very much like TIA."