____., _ _._ __ - -

--------

ARBARA BOXER c;AIJFoiu-

CJanitnt ~tatfS ~rnett HART SENA TE Offla 8l.Jll..Dl~G

SOOf 1\2 WASHINGTON. DC 20510..0SOS

1202! 224-!S53 l.ap;//'batlv .-le..90"/carstaci

December 16, 2002

~mx:s. CO~E. 5Cin Put!\JC W01U

DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY 3701 NORTHFAIRFAXDRIVE

The Honorable Barbara Boxer United States Senate Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Boxer:

ARLINGTON, VA 22203- 1714

JAN 3 I all3

Thank you for your letter regarding the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Total Information Awareness (TIA} project. I certainly appreciate your-continued support of DARPA and our pursuit of technologies tO.combat terrorism.

TIA is an experimental prototype system comprising innovative technologies that will give the national security community important new capabilities to uncover foreign terrorist acts against Americans. The only data used in this project will be that which is legally usable by the U.S. Government. Two oversight boards are being established to put the appropriate safeguards in place to ensure the privacy rights of American citizens are not violated.

I am plea,sed with the opportunity to provide you more information on the TIA project; an information paper is enclosed that specifically addresses the issues in your letter. I believe you will find the answers address your concerns about the TIA project, and I hope the information assures you that it is an important undertaking for the war on terrorism.

Enclosure: As stated

Sincerely,

A~~1dk Anthony J. Tether Director

DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY (DARPA) RESPONSES TO SENATOR BARBARA BOXER'S

QUESTIONS AND CONCERNS REGARDING THE DARPA TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS (TIA) PROJECT

Issue: Please detail all components of TIA and the goals and objectives for each of these components.

Response: TIA is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) research effort to create a prototype network that integrates innovative information technologies for detecting and preempting foreign terrorist activities against Americans .

The program is a multi year, phased, development effort. The information technologies comprising the experimental prototype network are in three areas: advanced collaborative and decision support tools; language translation; and data search, pattern recognition, and privacy protection technologies.

The collaborative reasoning and decision-support technologies will solve existing coordination problems by enabling analysts from one agency to collaborate effectively with analysts in other agencies. A major challenge to terrorist detection today is the inability to share data from databases maintained legally. The collaborative reasoning and decision-support technologies will punch holes in these .. stovepipes.~:

The language translation technologies will enable the rapid translation of foreign language speech and text giving terrorism analysts the ability to quickly search for clues about emerging terrorist acts . Terrorism experts believe evidence of terrorist activities can be found in open-source foreign language publications and broadcasts. The rapid translation technologies will help analysts search a significant amount of material in a much shorter period than is possible today.

The research into data search and pattern recognition technologies is based on the idea that terrorist planning activities or a likely terrorist attack could be uncovered by searching for pattems indicative of terrorist activities in vast quantities of data. For this research, the TIA project wiU use only data that is legally obtainable and usable by the U.S. GovemmenL The privacy protection technologies protect the TIA network from internal and external abuses and assure users that their sources and methods cannot be discerned deliberately or accidentally.

Today, the full TIA prototype exists only as a vision. A very limited prototype has been developed to demonstrate a partial set of functionalities in the form of better collaboration and data analysis tools.

When fully developed, TIA will directly support the Department of Defense (DoD) mission to counter foreign terrorist threats outside the United States using DoD's eY.isting intelligence sources. Congress will be fully consulted if and when the full implementation occurs before it is used operationally.

DARPA programs that are developing and evaluating technology for possible inclusion as . components of the TIA prototype system are: .. -

Collaborative Reasoning and Decision Support Technologies

- The Collaborative Environments and Tools to Aid Human Reasoning (Genoa-II) Program is developing technologies to enable teams of intelligence analysts and operations and policy personnel to be dramatically more effective and efficient in detecting terrorist activities. The project will apply automation to team processes so critical information-sharing tasks can be accomplished much sooner than is possible today. The program will develop tools to model current states, estimate plausible futures, support formal risk analysis, and provide for automated course-of-action planning.

- The Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (W AE) Program is developing threat-specific tools to enable analysts and decision makers to predict terrorist attacks. The program has three research thrusts: develop predictive methodologies and technologies that work within the complex and nonlinear characteristics of today's asynunetric adversaries; develop predictive technologies that will generalize from individuals to groups, from attack behavior to more subtle enabling behaviors/ decisions that precede an attack; and develop predictive sequence technologies to allow analysts to test a projected adversary's actions and reactions to potential intervention strategies.

Language Translation Technologies

- The Translingual Information Detection, Extraction, and Summarization (TIDES) Program is developing technologies to enable English-speaking operators and analysts to exploit the huge amounts of foreign speech and text available electronically, but currently unexploitable. TIDES is creating powerful new capabilities for detection (finding or discovering needed information), extraction (pulling out key information), summarization (substantially shortening what a user must read), and translation (converting foreign language material to English). Current program plans are to demonstrate capability to detect and track events described in English and Chinese news sources and create an initial capability to process Arabic text and audio s?urces

2

- The Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-Text (EARS) Program is developing automatic speech-to-text transcription technologies for the English, Chinese, and Arabic languages with an output substantially more accurate than currently possible. EARS will provide passive listening technology for critical languages and media for a wide range of national security applications. The program will demonstrate the ability to port applicable EARS technology to a new"language within 1 month. .

Data Search, Pattern Recognition, and Privacy Protection Technologies

- The Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) Program is developing a suite of technologies that will automatically extract evidence from vast amounts of unstructured textual data (such as intelligence messages or news reports) leading to the discovery of additional relevant relationships and patterns of activity that correspond to unusual events, potential threats, or planned attacks. They will allow for the identification of connected items of information from multiple sources and databases whose significance is not apparent until the connections are made. The program will exploit recent advances in language understanding software to provide a capability to automatically extract facts from textual messages, web pages, and other unstructured data sources at a performance level (90 percent accuracy) comparable to today's ability to extract entities (e.g., people, places, and organizations). The research will use only data that is legally available and obtainable by the U.S. Government or is synthetically generated.

- The Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) Program is developing cechnologies to discover critical infonnation from speech and text of many languages and automatically deliver it in actionable form to military operators and intelligence analysts. Computer programs using advanced algorithms will refine, combine, and package information from broadcasts, conversations, newswire and Internet sources , and examine the data for trends and deviations. The algorithms will discern analyst interest from past behavior {actions and reports) and issue critical alerts, reports, and pointers if the data matches the analyst's past interests. The program will leverage research from the TIDES and EARS programs.

- The Data Repository, Data Access and Privacy Protection (Genisys) Program will make it easier and cheaper to exploit distributed information sources and improve the ability to represent uncertainty in structured data. The technologies developed under this program will enable database integration with a fraction of today's design effort and retrieve accurate answers with less knowledge of the internal structure of the data. The program will also develop technologies to support automated declassification of data.

~

The Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) Program is developing automated, multimodal, biometric technologies to detect, recognize, and identify humans, alone or grouped, in disguise or not, at a distance (150 meters), day or night, and in all weather conditions. Automated biometric recognition technologies will provide critical early warning support against terrorist, criminal, and other human-based threats. Biometric signatures will be acquired from various collection sensors

3

including video, infrared, and multispectral sensors. The program is also examining the feasibility of networking biometric sensors to enable identification capabilities in large areas.

- The Biological Surveillance (BioSurv) Program will dramatically increase the DoD ability to quickly detect a clandestine biological warfare attack. The research will develop disease models to identify abnormal health detectors indicative of a . biological attack. The program will perform analyses on hypothesized events to detennine the indicators to detect bioterrorist releases.

- DARPA is evaluating technology research recommendations contained in the Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Security with Privacy Study. Two recommendations under investigation are immutable audit and self-reporting data. Immutable audit would track all TIA data search activities and capture data regarding these activities in a strong accounting system that could not be altered or turned off. Such audit control would make it possible to identify abuse of the TIA network as well as the identity of the abuser. Self-reporting data would protect the privacy of data even after it is retrieved from a database. For example, if data is passed to an unauthorized individual, self-reporting data will enable auditors to know who accessed it. This is required to protect the sources and methods of different agencies.

Issue: Please detail any and all changes TIA, if implemented, could potentially require to legal, statutory and regulatory frameworks concerning privacy and governmental access to individual records, including the Privacy Act of l 974.

Response: There are no plans to request a change to the Privacy Act of 1974 to accomplish the research. All research and experiments associated with the TIA system will use only data that is legally obtainable under existing laws.

Today, the full TIA prototype exists only as a vision and is in its first year of a multi year effort .. If the research is successful, organizations wanting to implement the TIA system will determine the types of infonnation they need to make the TIA system effective and whether the data is obtainable without changing existing laws. The Department of Homeland Security (HLS) will likely be the authority to decide on implementation of a TIA-like system for domestic authorities and the type of information and access required to make it an effective system.

4

Issue: What oversight is the Department of Defense or DARPA providing to ensure that taxpayer funding is not being used to develop technologies that would violate current legal, statutory and regulatory frameworks concerning privacy and governmental access to individual records?

Response: DoD is establishing two oversight boards to put the appropriate safeguards in place to ensure the privacy rights of American citizens are not violated.

Issue: Has the Department of Defense complied with all Freedom of Information Act requests concerning the TlA program?

Response: Yes. DARPA has received eight Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Two have been answered, and work is underway to answer the remaining six.

Issue: A Washington Post editorial questioned the naming of Admiral John Poindexter to oversee the Total Information Office stating that "his record oflying to Congress hardly makes him an ideal protector of the legal system, and his conduct of Iran-contra hardly makes him an advertisement for government competence." Given the intrusive nature of this project and its potential for misuse, do you believe it is appropriate for Admiral Poindexter to lead the office charge with overseeing TIA?

Response: Dr. Poindexter was hired~. a Section 1101 appointee under 5 U.S.C. 3104 note and Sec. 1101 of the Strom Thurmond National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999 (P.L. 105-261). Dr. Poindexter has a Ph.D. in physics and, thus, has the technical skills to lead the TIA effort. He has served at the highest levels in the Federal Government and understands how multi-agency decisions are made. These skills arc needed to lead the development of effective collaborative reasoning and decision-support technologies that comprise a significant part of the TIA project.

Issue: Please detail the total budget for TIA in fiscal year 2003. What is the planned future year budget of TIA? What funds have been obligated to date? (Please break down funding by component.)

Response: The total budget for TIA and related programs in the FY 2003 President's budget is as follows:

TIA Project Enabling Technologies

(EELD, W AE, Genisys, BioSurv, Human.ID) Translation Programs

(EARS, TIDES, GALE) Command, Control and Communications (Genoa D)

Total

5

78

42 ~

$137

The future years' budget will be outlined in the FY 2004 President's Budget, which will be available soon.

For TIA and related programs that have recorded obligations, the funds obligated to date are:

Enabling Technologies (EELD, WAE, Genisys. BioSurv, HumanID)

Translation Programs (EARS, TIDES, GALE)

Command, Control and Communications (Genoa Il) TIA

Total

FY03 ($M)

13.1

9.3 3.4 7.1

$32.9

Issue: Please list all non-governmental organizations and experts on civil liberties and privacy that were consulted during the development of TIA.

Response: Nongovernmental organizations and experts on civil liberties and privacy that have been consulted to date are:

Arlington Institute Potomac Institute National Academy of Sciences Heritage Foundation Information Science and Technology Study Group Electronic Privacy Information Council

6