- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The
Pentagon should end research aimed at sifting through everything from credit
card transactions to travel records for tip-offs to terrorist plots, the
American Civil Liberties Union told President Bush on Thursday.
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- "If the Pentagon has its way, every American --
from the Nebraskan farmer to the Wall Street banker -- will find themselves
under the accusatory cyber-state of an all-powerful national security apparatus,"
said Laura Murphy, director of the Washington national office.
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- The Pentagon program would create an infrastructure for
what the government hopes will become the most extensive electronic surveillance
in history, the watchdog group said.
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- The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's
cradle of emerging technologies, began awarding contracts this month for
development of a prototype "Total Information Awareness" system
-- a kind of vast global electronic dragnet.
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- The system would use statistical techniques known as
data mining to look for threatening patterns among everyday transactions,
the director of the effort, John Poindexter, a former national security
advisor, has said.
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- The civil liberties group said it would link commercial
and governmental databases in the United States and overseas, presumably
including everything from student report cards to mental-health histories.
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- If Bush refuses to kill the project now, said Katie Corrigan,
an ACLU legislative counsel, "Congress should step in quickly and
pull the plug on this dangerous idea."
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- Poindexter, a retired Navy admiral, has argued that the
government needs to "break down the stovepipes" separating commercial
and government data bases. Poindexter was convicted on five counts of deceiving
Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal but his conviction was set aside on
the grounds that his immunized congressional testimony had been used against
him.
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- "We must become much more efficient and more clever
in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new
and the old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert
it to knowledge, and create actionable options," he said in an Aug.
21 speech to a technology conference in Anaheim, California.
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- In the first related contract, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.
of Falls Church, Virginia, has been awarded $1.5 million worth of work
on a planned $62.9 million contract, the Army said last week. Work under
the contract is expected to be wrapped up by Nov. 7, 2007, the Army said.
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- Philip Zelikow, a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board who is executive director of a Markle Foundation task force
on national security in the information age, said the government's immediate
challenge was to make better use of the mountains of data already in its
hands or publicly available.
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- "Data mining, like any other government data analysis,
should occur where there is a focused and demonstrable need to know, balanced
against the dangers to civil liberties," he said. "It should
be purposeful and responsible."
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