Information Awareness Office

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Seal of the Information Awareness Office ; Motto: scientia est potentia .

The Information Awareness Office (ILO) was a project established by DARPA , an organizational unit of the United States Department of Defense . The ILO's task was to search a database for all available characteristics of the citizens of the state and to later evaluate them for suspicious patterns. This should be done primarily to counter terrorism .

history

The ILO was founded in early 2002 by US President Bush under the name Total Information Awareness . The name was later changed to Terrorist Information Awareness . John Poindexter was appointed director.

The first public notice was on February 13, 2002 in the New York Times . At that time, very little was known about the goals of the newly created agency. But the very fact that one would need petabyte- sized hard drives caused great astonishment and surveillance fears. Civil rights organizations, such as the EFF , protested against this agency because of Orwell's intentions and because of Poindexter's past.

On January 16, 2003, Senator Russ Feingold passed a law requiring Congress to review the activities of the ILO. Following a similar submission by another Senator, the ILO should no longer be allowed to operate in the United States. An order was issued at the end of February that the ILO should stop all activities.

On May 20, 2003, DARPA changed the name to Terrorist Information Awareness to make it clear that it did not want to prepare dossiers from US citizens. Instead, the agency should only serve to counter terrorism. Despite all this, it was decided two months later not to provide any more funds for the agency. Initially this meant the end for the ILO. However, some time later a program called ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement) was initiated, which pursues identical goals and is financed from the TTVA ( Threat and Vulnerability Testing and Assessment ) portfolio .

Research programs

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In the case of the research programs listed, it should be taken into account that, according to experts, large parts of these technologies were already available in principle; At least in the case of the NSA secret service it is assumed that it has been pursuing exactly the same programmatic objectives for decades. The impossibility of using these technologies may result from the special nature of the secret service.

Babylon

This program was intended to ensure communication during war operations. This should make it possible for the soldiers to communicate with the opposing side or with the injured. A program called Rapid Multilingual Support (RMS) has been used in Afghanistan .

Bio-Surveillance (BSS)

The task of the BSS was to develop techniques that recognize the use of biochemical weapons at an early stage. This should be done by monitoring animal tracks or specific signs of illness.

Effective, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-Text (EARS)

EARS should automatically translate speech to text. Mainly telephone calls were planned. The aim was to extract and process information from the conversations much faster.

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD)

The program should develop tools for the automatic detection and processing of suspicious facts in public and secret data sources. The main aim was to uncover relationships between people and / or organizations through communications.

FutureMap

The FutureMap is probably the best known and most criticized development of the ILO. It should represent a kind of stock exchange on which information relevant to security policy is traded. In a first stage, you could bet money on terrorist attacks. The moral aspect in particular was heavily criticized by the public. This eventually led to the project being quickly discontinued.

LifeLog

The goal of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to" trace the threads of an individual's life in terms of events, conditions and relationships "and it should have the ability to" record the entire experience of an individual, from the phone numbers dialed and respected E-mail messages down to every breath and step taken and location visited ".

Genisys

Genisys is the name of a database that is said to be able to process very large amounts of data. The paradigms of 1980 proved to be out of date. Instead, they wanted to start the following developments:

  1. Development of a simple query language
  2. Support of automatic restructuring of the data
  3. Storage of the data in the time context
  4. Creation of filters for privacy
  5. Development of a large distributed environment that can handle the enormous amounts of data

Human Identification at a Distance (HID)

This program makes it possible to identify people who are at some distance from the optical monitoring unit based on their gait or face shape.

Total Information Awareness (TIA) [discontinued]

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the US government initiated this project for total knowledge of information. This justified the completely detailed electronic surveillance of the population in the context of the fight against terrorism. Despite the President's support, the US Congress prohibited further funding of the project in late 2003.

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