Abuzz thread background material based on these three articles: Documents Acquired By ACLU Prove That MATRIX is a Data Mining Program (01/21/2004) NEW YORK--New documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union prove that data mining is at the heart of the controversial MATRIX police database system and reveal that the federal authorities have been deeply involved in developing the state-run effort to spy on citizens. http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=14763&c=130 - - - - - - Matrix Shares Crime Data All Things Considered audio http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1608129 NPR's Larry Abramson reports on a system that allows a number of states to share their criminal databases, and link it with other public information. The Matrix system has drawn criticism from privacy advocates, who say it's just like the Pentagon's controversial and discontinued Total Information Awareness project. - - - - - - - - http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/webfeatures/2003/12/blumenthal-m-12-19.html The American Prospect Data Debase The powerful technology known as data mining -- and how, in the government's hands, it could become a civil libertarian's nightmare. Max Blumenthal - - - - - - - - - - - http://www.counterpunch.org/guthrie06032003.html June 3, 2003 Stepping into Some Deep Darpa By HAMMOND GUTHRIE Total Information Awareness (TIA)--now Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA) is a Defense Department program with built-in mechanisms allowing surveillance to develop ontology-based (sub)systems that trace the "threads" of daily life DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has pledged to assess privacy and provide rigorous oversight over all nonexistent dossiers on non-terrorist U.S. citizens An oversight board of senior intelligence representatives, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, and The Defense secretary will be in control of analyzing these human behavioral patterns You know--the people we can trust DARPA is searching for the Diary Matrix to make (ido)logical predictions about behavior in the manner of the secret Mayan Calendar - smart soldiers crossing dimensions of time The Diary Matrix records everything an individual does into a giant database GPS transmitters to keep tabs on where you go, audio-visual sensors to capture what you saw and said, while biomedical monitors keep track of your mental health Someone with access can retrieve past transactions, recall an experience seconds ago or many years earlier .. DARPA is evil! Why would the Defense Department do such a thing? The parameters have not yet been determined, yet existential technology and the metaphysics of surveillance will assure immortality "Patterns in the timeline support the identification of routines, relationships, and habits, preferences, plans, goals, and other markers of intentionality are at the highest level." Fine--but what's it good for? Hammond Guthrie is the author of AsEverWas: Memoirs of a Beat Survivor. He is the editor of the great online journal The 3rd Page. He can be reached at: writenow@spiritone.com http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacylist.cfm?c=130 Documents Acquired By ACLU Prove That MATRIX is a Data Mining Program (01/21/2004) NEW YORK--New documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union prove that data mining is at the heart of the controversial MATRIX police database system and reveal that the federal authorities have been deeply involved in developing the state-run effort to spy on citizens. http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=14763&c=130 - - - - - - http://americasucks.net/archives/000005.html TIA no more; MATRIX a similar threat On the 26th of September WarBlogging reported on the demise of Total Information Awareness [link]; the threat of a national surveillance program is gone, with the Senate voting 95 to 0 in favour of the legislation to end it. (Barely a shred of evidence has been left on the DARPA website to indicate that the project ever existed.) Certainly something worth breathing a sigh of relief about. However, in its stead comes MATRIX (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange). The Register has reported with details of how MATRIX will be almost as big a threat as TIA was [link] - a $4 million contribution to the program from the Department of Justice and $8 million from the Department of Homeland Security indicates government interest, yet MATRIX seems focused largely on criminal activities unrelated to international terrorism. The Washington Post wrote about MATRIX a couple of months ago [link]. To quote the article: "It would let authorities ... instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event." MATRIX promises to be a very powerful system (especially as more states join up), but the potential for abuse is alarming, especially when its implementation apparently needs to be covered by the 'anti-terrorism' failsafe. Posted by TACD at 18:48 on October 04, http://www.darpa.mil/ http://www.americasucks.net/topics/matrix.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A21872-2003Aug5 MATRIX: Your Personal Information in a Database Put Together By State Law Enforcement Considering how quickly and easily database systems that collect citizen information can be abused, with personal data used against political opponents, as well as data reflecting massive mistakes that cause great harm to citizens, the reporting of the MATRIX program in Florida is alarming. For examples of abuses happening now, see Grounding the Flying Nun by Dave Lindorff/Salon, who after making a remark about George Bush being dumb found herself on the "FBI no-fly list", along with some journalists and others included for political reasons, as well as folks who just had similar names to those who actually are criminals. Also, Andrew Gumbel/The Independent has this story on US anti-war activists hit by secret airport ban about political uses of the No-Fly list by the Transportation Security Administration. On a national level, Congress has taken seriously their responsibility for oversight of the Total Information Awareness or Terrorism Information Awareness program. John Poindexter and the TIA/DARPA have found themselves responsible to Congress for their ideas (Reuters reports that Poindexter plans to offer his resignation over the latest TIA plan to use futures-trading market data to predict assassinations, terrorism and other events in the Middle East). But if each state collects and maintains citizen's data, each with different standards for correcting, aggregating and using the data, and if states string together their databases, as several states would like to collaborate with Florida to do (Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Utah so far in the MATRIX -- click here for their contacts list; and the District of Columbia and Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York in the DC program as reported by Spencer S. Hsu/WDC Post), I think we will have a far more dispersed and frightening problem than what the TIA proposed. Does this mean Safire, and Harrow do another round of columns, Congress and (hopefully) State Legislatures get involved to control this effort toward Too much surveillance (by Safire) of citizens? How effective can we as citizens be in asking for legislative oversight when there are so many different states and entities involved? Well, step one is in place: Robert O'Harrow Jr/Washington Post says that Florida is using our personal data in new and *interesting ways*, and the US government has taken note (specifically the Department of Homeland Security), as well as other states, wanting to use it to access our personal data to fight terrorists: U.S. Backs Florida's New Counterterrorism Database: 'Matrix' Offers Law Agencies Faster Access to Americans' Personal Records. Florida officials say the system will be used only by authorized investigators under tight supervision. They said it includes information that has always been available to investigators but brings it together and enables police to access it with extraordinary speed. Technical challenges include ensuring that data are accurate and that the system can be updated frequently. "The power of this technology -- to take seemingly isolated bits of data and tie them together to get a clear picture in seconds -- is vital to strengthening our domestic security," said James "Tim" Moore, who was commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement until last month. A senior official overseeing the project acknowledged it could be intrusive and pledged to use it with restraint. "It's scary. It could be abused. I mean, I can call up everything about you, your pictures and pictures of your neighbors," said Phil Ramer, special agent in charge of statewide intelligence. "Our biggest problem now is everybody who hears about it wants it." MATRIX, which stands for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, has this to say (from their website) about Data Security: Information submitted by a state may only be disseminated in accordance with restrictions and conditions placed on it by the submitting state, pursuant to the submitting state's laws and regulations. Information will be made available only to law enforcement agencies, and on a need-to-know and right-to-know basis. Data access permissions will be conditioned on the privileges of the user making the inquiry. But what is that? How do we know the MATRIX system builders are protecting their systems from cackers (think identity theft paradise) or those who may want information but don't have proper clearance, and what is the mechanism for overseeing that properly accessed information is not improperly used against people? Who will have oversight, who will track this ongoing, who will make sure this system does not deteriorate into the Nixon enemies list or some other big brother attempt to control citizen's unlawfully? Posted by Mary Hodder at August 06, 2003 08:37 AM | TrackBack http://www.sainc.com/tapac/library.htm Committee Documents: May 23rd Meeting Agenda Introductory Presentation Newton N. Minow - Chairman of TAPAC Lisa Davis - Executive Director of TAPAC Presentation DoD Employees Guide to the Standards of Conduct A Very Brief Summary of the Standards of Conduct for Special Government Employees Travel and Transportation Expenses DARPA Overview Presentation Terrorism Information Awareness Program Presentation Report to Congress Executive Summary Conclusion: Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee Meeting Meeting Minutes Other Documents Provided to Committee Executive Order 12333 of December 4, 1981. About TAPAC: The Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee (TAPAC) is being established in consonance with the public interest and in accordance with the provisions of Pub.L. 92-463, the "Federal Advisory Committee Act," title 5 U.S.C., Appendix 2. The TAPAC will advise the Secretary of Defense concerning the legal and policy considerations implicated by the application of pattern queries/data correlation technology to counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence missions. At the request of the Secretary of Defense, the Committee will prepare a report concerning the use of advanced information technologies to help identify terrorists before they act, while at the same time, protecting civil liberties. The committee will consist of members selected on the basis of their preeminence in the fields of constitutional law and public policy relating to communication and information management. TAPAC Charter (PDF) TAPAC Establishment Notice DoD News Release: Total Information Awareness (TIA) Update, Feb. 7, 2003 http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2003/b02072003_bt060-03.html June 10th Press Release - - - - http://www.markletaskforce.org/headlines.html MARKLE FOUNDATION This is the second report of an extraordinary task force we have been privileged to co-chair. This remarkable and diverse group has come together to serve our nation by doing the hard work of considering how we can create an information network that prevents terrorism and protects the security of our homeland, while preserving the civil liberties that are a fundamental part of our national values. In the Task Force’s first report, we stressed the importance of creating a decentralized network of information-sharing and analysis to address the challenge of homeland security. We emphasized the need to form that network around presidential guidelines shaped by public debate on how to both achieve security and maintain liberty. We also set forth principles for capitalizing on our society’s strengths in information and technology. In this second report, we reaffirm those principles and provide greater detail on how to implement our approach. The network we envision would be created with the following key elements, which reflect the character of the distributed, asymmetric threat we confront: The handling of information should be decentralized, and should take place directly among users, according to a network model rather than a mainframe or hub-and-spoke model. The network should be guided by policy principles that simultaneously empower and constrain government officials by making it clear what is permissible and what is prohibited. Our government’s strategy should focus on prevention. The distinguishing line between domestic and foreign threats is increasingly difficult to sustain. Thus, in its approach, our government should avoid creating blind spots, or gaps between agencies, that arise from this distinction. At the same time, though, our government needs urgently to define new rules—rules to replace the old “line at the border” between domestic and foreign authorities for information-collection and use—to ensure that agencies do not infringe on our traditional civil liberties. The network should reflect the fact that many key participants are not in the federal government, but rather in state or local government and the private sector. The network should make it possible for the government to effectively utilize not only information gathered through clandestine intelligence activities and law enforcement investigations, but also appropriate information held by private companies. This should happen only after clear articulation by the government of the need for this information and the issuance of guidelines for its collection and use. Combating terrorism is a long-term effort that is designed to protect our way of life and our values along with our security. Therefore, the policies and actions undertaken need to have the support—and trust—of the American people. Privacy and other civil liberties must be protected. What do these principles mean in practice? First, our government should give greater priority to sharing and analyzing information. In the Cold War intelligence architecture, the government placed a premium on the security of information. It developed a system that tightly controlled access to information by requiring that every individual have a demonstrable “need to know” certain information before he could see it and by allowing the agency that initially acquired the intelligence to restrict further dissemination of that intelligence. This system assumed that it was possible to determine a priori who needed to know particular information. And it reflected the judgment that the risk of inadvertent or malicious disclosure was greater than the benefit of wider information-sharing. This architecture and the underlying assumptions are ill suited to today’s challenges. The events of September 11, 2001, have starkly demonstrated the dangers associated with the failure to share information, not only within the federal government, but also between the federal government, on the one hand, and state and local governments and the private sector on the other. Therefore, the government should open up the system to state and local agencies and officials and, in some circumstances, to private sector actors, providing access not just to information but to technology and money as well. Our government should reengineer operational processes where needed and build the technology architecture and tools that will facilitate two-way sharing and interoperability. Our government should also take into account the needs of the users, as well as the agency that originally developed the information, in deciding whether or how to control where the information goes. This should take place in an environment in which the need to protect both the security of sensitive information and individual civil liberties is consistently addressed. Furthermore, our government should effectively utilize the valuable information that is held in private hands, but only within a system of rules and guidelines designed to protect civil liberties. Our nation can never hope to harden all potential targets against terrorist attack. Therefore, we must rely on information to try to detect, prevent, and respond to attacks. The travel, hotel, financial, immigration, health, or educational records of a person suspected by our government of planning terrorism may hold information that is vital to unveiling both his activities and the identities and activities of other terrorists. But until the government devises consistent guidelines for controlling when and how such information is accessed and used—and until those guidelines are publicly debated—the public’s concerns over potential privacy infringements will continue to hamper the necessary development of new technologies and new operational programs to use that information. The need to create the network we envision is more urgent than ever. Terrorism remains a continuing threat around the world. And the potential for terrorists to use weapons of mass destruction raises the stakes considerably. Building the technical architecture, changing agency cultures, establishing new rules and procedures, and securing the necessary funding all take time. It is therefore imperative that the steps we recommend receive immediate attention. We urge the Executive Branch and Congress to implement the measures necessary to create the proposed Systemwide Homeland Analysis and Response Exchange Network (SHARE)—which would empower all participants to be full and active partners in protecting our security, and which would be governed by guidelines designed to protect our liberties. Zoë Baird James Barksdale Location: Task Force on National Security in the Information Age Markle Foundation 10 Rockefeller Plaza 16th Floor New York, NY 10020-1903 Phone: 212-713-7600 Fax: 212-765-9690 About the Markle Foundation: The Task Force on National Security in the Information Age is supported by the Markle Foundation, a New York-based private philanthropy that works to realize the potential of emerging communications and technology to improve people's lives. The Foundation has two active program areas: Information Technologies for Better Health, and Policy for a Networked Society, under which The Task Force on National Security in the Information Age falls. The Markle Foundation's overarching goal in this area is to enhance national security through innovative use of information and communications technologies developed in a manner protective of personal security and liberty. For more information, see www.markle.org. In Alliance With: Center for Strategic & International Studies The Brookings Institution - - - - - - - - http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/webfeatures/2003/12/blumenthal-m-12-19.html The American Prospect Data Debase The powerful technology known as data mining -- and how, in the government's hands, it could become a civil libertarian's nightmare. Max Blumenthal Steven Spielberg's 2002 film Minority Reportdepicted a futuristic dystopia in which a "Department of Pre-Crime" jails people for acts they haven't yet committed. In an apparent case of life imitating art, Spielberg's Shoah Foundation -- a nonprofit the film director established in 1994 to videotape and preserve the testimonies of Holocaust survivors -- has handed over the words of 51,000 Holocaust survivors to aid a team of government-funded researchers in developing a revolutionary technology inspired by elements of the Pentagon's scuttled domestic-surveillance program, Total Information Awareness (TIA). TIA, which was blocked by Congress, was to have been a mix of high-tech voice-recognition and data-mining programs that would have made up the largest domestic-surveillance system in the United States. Using TIA, intelligence analysts and law-enforcement officials would have been able to trawl through Americans' private records -- including banking transactions, e-mail accounts and travel records, such as plane ticket information -- in order to finger terrorists. Though TIA would have been composed largely of voice-recognition surveillance programs, it was the proposal's reliance on the new science of data mining that had groups from the American Civil Liberties Union to the archconservative Free Congress Foundation up in arms. Broadly speaking, data mining is an innovation of statistical science that allows analysts to detect patterns of events and relationships in order to discover a "gem," or a hidden fact. The idea is to allow users to accurately forecast future events. When data mining emerged in the late 1990s, MIT's Technology Review hailed it as one of the 10 new technologies that will "change the world." Since then, data mining has revolutionized everything from how companies monitor customers' online purchasing habits to how the federal government practices counterterrorism. Data-mining advocates within the law-enforcement and intelligence communities claim the science makes retrieval of existing information more convenient, allowing them to identify and track terrorists without costly and time-consuming legwork. However, data-mining programs like TIA -- which would have allowed analysts to sift through private citizens' personal records without a search warrant in order to identify patterns that would suggest terrorist activity -- pose some pretty serious due-process problems. Data mining seeks to classify a person's threat level according to superficial patterns of activity like bank withdrawals and travel history. Supporters say this is useful because terrorists typically lead transient lifestyles and have spotty pasts. But so do homeless people, migrant workers and more than a few journalists. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of data mining is that it offers the government a convenient tool to analyze individuals' political and religious affiliations by investigating library records, magazine subscriptions and group memberships. Of course, there is no indication that this is actually happening, but it is a possibility that civil-liberties advocates worry about. Though Congress elected to defund TIA -- in a nearly unanimous Sept. 24 vote on defense budget appropriations -- the Bush administration is backing a series of TIA-inspired data-mining programs set for implementation by other government agencies and private companies. The Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Agency is planning to employ an airline-security program in 2004 called Customer Assisted Passenger Profiling II (CAPPS II), which will use data mining to assign color codes to passengers based on their potential threat levels. A private data-mining company, Seisint Inc., has received funding from the departments of Justice and Homeland Security for a program called Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (Matrix), which is set for implementation in five states. And the National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding a data-mining project -- led by university researchers and Spielberg's Shoah Foundation -- that would allow users to index massive audio recordings by specific spoken words or phrases. And TIA itself has not really gone away. In July, as the Senate seemed poised to ban data-mining programs entirely, the White House's Office of Budget and Management protested the restriction of what it called "a powerful potential tool in the war on terrorism," stating, "The administration urges the Senate to remove the provision that prohibits any research and development for the Terrorism Information Awareness [TIA] program." As a result of White House pressure, the bill ultimately agreed upon by a joint House-Senate appropriations committee made allowances for TIA's voice-recognition programs to continue in a research-and-development phase at the Pentagon, while its data-mining programs were transferred to the National Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP), an agency with a classified budget jointly managed by the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency (NSA). The bill also glaringly avoided the term "data mining," instead authorizing the NFIP to employ "processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence." And the committee limited the NFIP to tracking "non-citizens"-- meaning, in effect, that foreigners living and working in the United States are still subject to being tracked by TIA. In July, as the Senate seemed poised to ban data-mining programs entirely, the White House's Office of Budget and Management protested the restriction of what it called "a powerful potential tool in the war on terrorism," stating, "The administration urges the Senate to remove the provision that prohibits any research and development for the Terrorism Information Awareness [TIA] program." So TIA's most controversial features live on, though in a limited scope and shrouded in the thick of a bureaucratic wilderness. Case in point: The Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity division, a group that works to protect the Defense Department and its personnel from espionage threats, has recently been charged with conducting a data-mining mission, which, according to the Los Angeles Timesí William Arkin, includes "process[ing] massive sets of public records, intercepted communications, credit card accounts, etc., to find 'actionable intelligence.'" As David Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told me, the bevy of data-mining surveillance programs popping up in government agencies is a trend that will continue to be difficult to monitor. "At the moment there is no government-wide restriction on what we commonly think of as data mining," Sobel explained. "Similar programs and the development of related technologies are likely to be driven underground, and at the moment I don't think there's a very good sense on what those initiatives might be." Information has surfaced recently revealing that one of the government's major data-mining initiatives, CAPPS II, was developed largely "underground" with the help of private corporations unaccountable to the public. It is not known exactly when CAPPS II's development was initiated, though the program likely began in December 2001, when, according to The Washington Times, NASA's Aviation Systems Division obtained more than 15 million private passenger records from Northwest Airlines after a secret meeting between officials from the two organizations. According to documents obtained by the Times in August 2002, NASA officials solicited Northwest's records for use as research data in developing what would have amounted to a mind-reading device. NASA proposed in these documents to detect and analyze passengers' brainwaves, heartbeat rates and eye-flicker rates and correlate them with data on their travel routines, criminal background and credit information from "hundreds to thousands of data sources" to "determine who is a threat." Though NASA's bizarre proposal has yet to come to fruition, the development of a strikingly similar program came to light this September, when Jet Blue Airlines admitted to handing over the personal records of 5 million customers in early 2002 to Torch Concepts, a private data-mining contractor hired by the Defense Department. TSA officials have subsequently admitted that they facilitated the handover of Jet Blue's records to Torch; they told Wired News that the study was for a program to improve security on U.S. Army bases. However, a look at Torch's test, which bears no mention of the military, suggests something altogether different. According to Torch documents discovered online by travel privacy activist Edward Hasbrouck, the test correlated Jet Blue customers' records with their Social Security numbers, income levels and home ownership statuses to group customers into one of three categories based on their perceived threat level: young, middle-income homeowners; older, upper-income homeowners; and a group of passengers with "anomalous" records. Torch's method of classification looks like a blueprint for CAPPS II, which would require airline passengers to provide carriers with their home addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth for entry in a government-administered computer system. That information would be correlated with government and commercial data including bank account information and travel records. Finally, passengers would be placed in one of three color-coded categories based on their perceived threat levels. Those deemed "anomalous" in Torch's experiment would have been assigned a yellow code under CAPPS II and subjected to additional security checks; those judged nonthreatening would earn a green code and board smoothly; and those whose names showed up on a watch list would be labeled red and then barred from flying or arrested. As with TIA, CAPPS II has renewed the debate in Congress over the appropriate place of data mining in a democratic society. Led by the technology's staunchest opponent on Capitol Hill, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), lawmakers have taken steps to further restrict its use, making CAPPS II's funding in the Homeland Security appropriations bill contingent on a favorable review by the General Accounting Office, which is preparing a report on the program's ability to differentiate between terrorists and innocent people. Congress has no jurisdiction, however, to oversee another TIA-like program developed by private Boca Raton, Fla., technology firm Seisint Inc. for use by state governments. Seisint's "Matrix" program is essentially a scaled-down version of TIA that uses data mining to establish links between people and patterns of events. The Washington Post reported that the system would be able to "find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event." But precisely because of the program's near-omniscient power, even Florida's special agent in charge of statewide intelligence is worried. As he told the Post, "It's scary. It could be abused. I mean, I can call up everything about you, your pictures and pictures of your neighbors." Matrix has been in use in Florida for more than a year and in August, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to incorporate nearly a dozen states into the program. Matrix is the creation of former alleged drug smuggler Hank Asher, who, according to the Post, boasted to Florida police officials in the wake of the September 11 attacks that he could develop a system to find the hijackers and any terrorists who might strike in the future. Since Asher initiated the program, Seisint, of which he is CEO, has received a $4 million grant from the Department of Justice and an $8 million pledge from the Department of Homeland Security, a signal of the federal government's determination to spread the program nationwide. Indeed, as reported by the Post, in a Jan. 26, 2003, speech to the Florida Sheriffs Winter Conference, state Commissioner of Law Enforcement James Moore called Matrix the "first step in developing a national intelligence network." If deployed throughout the country, a program such as Matrix would give local police officers the same power to snoop through individuals' personal records and analyze data that Pentagon anti-terrorrism experts would have enjoyed with TIA. According to Matrix's Web site, this would mean prying into an individual's criminal history, driverís license data, vehicle-registration records and incarceration records, including digitized photographs, "with significant amounts of public data record entries." Because the site does not specify which type of "public data record entries" are to be searched, there is no assurance against the investigation of magazine subscriptions, library records and group affiliations -- political, religious or otherwise. Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation and the Shoah Foundation are developing a technology that would give users the power to search through large recordings of speech in any of 32 languages to instantly find a given word or phrase. To develop this technology, called Multilingual Access to Large Spoken Archives (MALACH), the NSF earmarked $7.5 million in 2001 to Shoah and a team of university computer scientists. Today, MALACH is one of the most ambitious and highly funded programs in the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program -- a group with a $5 billion annual budget that NSF administers, along with agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the NSA -- to create new indexing, information-retrieval and data-mining technology. (NSF's MALACH administrator, Saul Greenspan, declined to be interviewed for this article.) According to press releases from the Shoah Foundation and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computational Studies (UMIACS), which is spearheading MALACH's research, the impetus for developing MALACH came from Shoah, which was struggling to index 116,000 hours of digitally archived videotape testimony from more than 51,000 Holocaust survivors (many of whom are still alive). So far, at its Los Angeles museum, Shoah has managed to index only 4,000 individual testimonies at a whopping cost of $8 million. An audio search engine like MALACH would make the indexing process a walk in the park, which is why Shoah turned over its entire archive of Holocaust testimonies to MALACH's research team for use as a data set to test the technology. However, with such a large grant from the NSF, it would be naive to assume that MALACH is an altruistic gift to Shoah. Indeed, a UMIACS press release acknowledges that "this technology will produce significant impact, both through improved access to our cultural heritage and through the application of the techniques that we will develop to other important problems." Whether those "other important problems" include terrorism does not concern Sam Gustman, Shoah's technology director and a former information-retrieval specialist from the Army Corps of Engineers. "If the results of the National Science Foundation project are used by other projects, it's public," Gustman told me. "Our goal is to help the [NSF] further the state-of-the-art technology. Now, if someone uses that [technology] for something else, well, that's the effect of working on something in the public domain." One of MALACH's lead researchers is Douglas Oard of the University of Maryland, an information-retrieval and automated-translation specialist who is also an expert in high-tech counterterrorism applications. His expertise earned him a grant from DARPA's Information Awareness Office to develop an Arabic and Chinese automatic translation program called TIDES (Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization) which was to be a major component of TIA. Oard also participated in a recent DARPA project to develop tools to translate Hindi into English. And he has taught a seminar at the University of Maryland called "Information Technology and the War on Terror." Asked about MALACH's origins, Oard says the program grew out of his earlier work for DARPA developing TIA. As he told me, MALACH "takes some of the research from TIDES, the DARPA program, and it applies it to a National Science Foundation program." Oard would not address MALACH's potential application to the war on terrorism directly, but he did make clear that it could have a broad societal impact. "If you could [implement MALACH], it would change a lot of things -- and we're making very good progress -- about how we do things in our society," Oard said. "Recording conversations is not hard to do, but using the recorded conversation is extremely difficult. So we're trying to make tools that will help you with that. As soon as we do that, we will have changed a fundamental assumption in our society that speech is ephemeral. This could very well revolutionize the way in which our society treats speech." Just as data mining gives analysts the power to dig through anything from someone's travel records to their Department of Motor Vehicles files for a valuable piece of information, MALACH would allow them to do the same with recorded speech. Considering that thousands of hours of speech are recorded each week in dozens of languages through surveillance satellites and wiretaps by agencies like the NSA, the speed and convenience that MALACH would afford investigators in searching for specific words and phrases is likely to lower the threshold on government snooping. Oard is surprisingly frank on the question of whether the technology he is developing provides cause for concern. "It's not worth worrying about as a developer," he said. "As a member of society it's very worth worrying about." Max Blumenthal is a writer living in Los Angeles. - - - - - - - SIAM http://www.siam.org/ Applied mathematics, in partnership with computational science, is essential in solving many real-world problems: modeling physical, chemical, and biomedical phenomena; designing engineered parts, structures, and systems to optimize performance; planning and managing financial and marketing strategies; understanding and optimizing manufacturing processes. To ensure the strongest interactions between mathematics and other scientific and technological communities, it remains the policy of SIAM to: advance the application of mathematics and computational science to engineering, industry, science, and society; promote research that will lead to effective new mathematical and computational methods and techniques for science, engineering, industry, and society; provide media for the exchange of information and ideas among mathematicians, engineers, and scientists. Problems in applied mathematics and computational science arise in companies that manufacture aircraft, automobiles, engines, textiles, computers, communications systems, chemicals, drugs, and a host of other industrial and consumer products, and also in various service and consulting organizations. They also arise in many research initiatives of the federal government, such as those in global change, biotechnology, and advanced materials. SIAM fosters the development of the methodologies needed in these application areas. It is fitting that the acronym SIAM also represents the society’s slogan—Science and Industry Advance with Mathematics. Just as applied mathematics has grown, so has SIAM membership—from a few hundred in the early 1950s to close to 9,000 today. SIAM members are applied and computational mathematicians, computer scientists, numerical analysts, engineers, statisticians, and mathematics educators. They work in industrial and service organizations, universities, colleges, and government agencies and laboratories all over the world. In addition, SIAM has over 400 institutional members—colleges, universities, corporations, and research organizations. - - - - - Matrix Shares Crime Data All Things Considered audio http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1608129 NPR's Larry Abramson reports on a system that allows a number of states to share their criminal databases, and link it with other public information. The Matrix system has drawn criticism from privacy advocates, who say it's just like the Pentagon's controversial and discontinued Total Information Awareness project. - - - - - - - 2004 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining http://www.siam.org/meetings/sdm04/ Advances in information technology and data collection methods have led to the availability of large data sets in commercial enterprises and in a wide variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. We have an unprecedented opportunity to analyze this data and extract intelligent and useful information from it. The field of data mining draws upon extensive work in areas such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases, and high performance computing to discover interesting and previously unknown information in data. This conference will provide a forum for the presentation of recent results in data mining, including applications, algorithms, software, and systems. There will be peer reviewed, contributed papers as well as invited talks and tutorials. Best paper awards will be given in different categories. Proceedings of the conference will be available both online at the SIAM Web site and in hard copy form. In addition, several workshops on topics of current interest will be held on the final day of the conference. TOPICS OF INTEREST Methods and Algorithms Query/constraint-based data mining Probabilistic/statistical methods Mining spatial, temporal and heterogeneous data Trend and periodicity analysis Parallel/distributed/agent techniques Scalable algorithms Integration: mining, warehousing and OLAP Mining of data streams Data reduction/pre-processing Feature extraction and selection Post-processing Collaborative filtering/personalization Cost-based decision making Visual data mining Applications Intelligence analysis Genomics, bioinformatics and biometrics Medical and health industry Text, video, and multi-media mining E-commerce and web data Financial data analysis Intrusion detection Remote sensing and earth sciences Astronomy Non-destructive evaluation Case studies / benchmarks Novel applications Human Factors and Social Issues Languages/user interface for data mining Security / privacy of information Intellectual ownership Risk analysis CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS Chandrika Kamath, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory David Skillicorn, Queen’s University PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS Umeshwar Dayal, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Michael W. Berry, University of Tennessee Program Committee Deepak K. Agarwal, AT&T Shannon Labs Mihael Ankerst, The Boeing Company Chid Apte, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Lars Asker, Stockholm University, Sweden Daniel Barbara, George Mason University Roberto J. Bayardo, IBM Almaden Clifford Behrens, Telcordia Technologies, Inc. Michael R. Berthold, Tripos, Inc. Malú; Castellanos, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Philip Chan, Florida Institute of Technology Edward, Chang, University of California Sanjay Chawla, University of Sydney, Australia Ming-Syan Chen, National Taiwan University Alok Choudhary, Northwestern University Chris Clifton, Purdue University Corinna Cortes, AT&T Laboratories, Research George Cybenko, Dartmouth College Tamraparni Dasu, AT&T Laboratories - Research Dennis DeCoste, California Institute of Technology Inderjit S. Dhillon, University of Texas, Austin Jennifer G. Dy, Northeastern University Wei Fan, IBM, T.J.Watson Research Ronen Feldman, Bar-Ilan University, Israel William R. Ferng, The Boeing Company Peter A. Flach, University of Bristol, United Kingdom Johannes Fuernkranz, Austrian Research Inst. for Artificial Intelligence, Austria Minos Garofalakis, Bell Laboratories Johannes Gehrke, Cornell University Joydeep Ghosh, University of Texas, Austin Sara James Graves, University of Alabama, Huntsville Marko Grobelnik, J. Stefan Institute Jiawei Han, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Howard Ho, IBM Almaden Research Center Piotr Indyk, Massachusettes Institute of Technology Bala Iyer, IBM Silicon Valley Lab George Karypis, University of Minnesota Daniel A. Keim, University of Constance, Germany Eamonn Keogh, University of California, Riverside Jacob Kogan, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Helene E. Kulsrud, Center for Communications Research Diane Lambert, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies Wenke Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology King-Ip (David) Lin, University of Memphis Jiming Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Sheng Ma, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Vasileios Megalooikonomou, Temple University Rajeev Motwani, Stanford University Richard R. Muntz, University of California, Los Angeles S. Muthukrishnan, Rutgers University and AT&T Research Zoran Obradovic, Temple University Sankar K. Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, India Byung-Hoon Park, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Haesun Park, University of Minnesota Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Ohio State University Jian Pei, State University of New York, Buffalo David M. Pennock, Overture Services, Inc. William M. Pottenger, Lehigh University Raghu Ramakrishnan, University of Wisconsin-Madison Luc De Raedt, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany Patricia J Riddle, University of Auckland, New Zealand Greg Ridgeway, RAND John Roddick, Flinders University, Australia Joerg Sander, University of Alberta, Canada Lorenza Saitta, University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy David W. Scott, Rice University Kyuseok Shim, Seoul National University, Korea Simeon J. Simoff, University of Technology,Sydney, Australia Krishnamoorthy Sivakumar, Washington State University Myra Spiliopoulou, Otto-von-Guericke-Universitaet Magdeburg, Germany Nicolas Spyratos, Universite Paris-Sud, France Jaideep Srivastava, University of Minnesota Domenico Talia, University of Calabria, Italy Kai Ming Ting, Monash University, Australia Hannu Toivonen, University of Helsinki, Finland Shusaku Tsumoto, Shimane Medical University, Japan Ramasamy Uthurusamy, General Motors Corporation Jason T. L. Wang, New Jersey Institute of Technology Haixun Wang, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center Layne T. Watson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Geoffrey I. Webb, Monash University, Australia Sally Wood, University of New South Wales, Australia Stefan Wrobel, Fraunhofer AIS and University of Bonn Xindong Wu, University of Vermont Xintao Wu, University of North Carolina, Charlotte Philip S. Yu, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Osmar R. Zaiane, University of Alberta, Canada Mohammed J. Zaki, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Hongyuan Zha, Pennsylvania State University Chengqi Zhang, University of Technology, Australia Ning Zhong, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan STEERING COMMITTEE Vipin Kumar, Chair, AHPCRC, University of Minnesota Steven Ashby, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Umeshwar Dayal, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Usama Fayyad, Digimine Robert Grossman, University of Illinois, Chicago Jiawei Han, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign David Hand, Imperial College, UK Heikki Mannila, Nokia Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University Andrew Odlyzko, DTC, University of Minnesota N. Radhakrishnan, Army Research Laboratory Jeffrey Ullman, Stanford University Abuzz thread background material based on these two stories Documents Acquired By ACLU Prove That MATRIX is a Data Mining Program (01/21/2004) NEW YORK--New documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union prove that data mining is at the heart of the controversial MATRIX police database system and reveal that the federal authorities have been deeply involved in developing the state-run effort to spy on citizens. Matrix Shares Crime Data All Things Considered audio http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1608129 NPR's Larry Abramson reports on a system that allows a number of states to share their criminal databases, and link it with other public information. The Matrix system has drawn criticism from privacy advocates, who say it's just like the Pentagon's controversial and discontinued Total Information Awareness project.