High tech hunting

ASEE Prism, Jan 2003 by Auster, Bruce

While Americans weigh the future of national security and personal privacy, the Pentagon's controversial Information Awareness Office breaks its silence about plans to use technology to stop tomorrow's terrorists.

"It's very DARPA-esque." Granted, that not-ready-for-prime-time adjective won't likely make it into the next edition of Webster's dictionary. But that's the term Robert Popp settles on to describe what he believes is the visionary work on counterterrorism being performed by the Pentagon's elite Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Popp, an electrical engineer by training, is deputy director of DARPA's controversial new Information Awareness Office, which aims to be able to spot potential terrorists by tracking their financial footprints. The new DARPA shop, which got its start in January 2002 and is led by retired Adm. John Poindexter, has inspired editorial writers across the country to dust off old copies of George Orwell's 1984: It seems that by pairing the one-time Reagan national security adviser and Iran-Contra defendant with a scheme to snoop on people's purchases, the Pentagon may have crossed the civil-liberties line.

But what, exactly, is Poindexter's Information Awareness Office all about? In the first interview the Pentagon has permitted on the subject since the controversy exploded, Popp spoke with Prism about DARPA's role in the counterterror fight, about the technical challenges that the IAO seeks to meet, and about the privacy issues raised by this "DARPA-esque" effort to try to identify terrorists operating inside the United States-and stop them before they strike.

DARPA, like many organizations, began refocusing its efforts after September 11 to help in the war against terrorism. The agency, of course, has a special mission. Created following the Soviet launch of Sputnik, its role is to find ways to use technology to protect the nation's security. In the past that meant breakthroughs such as the development of the Internet. Now, with help from the university engineering community, DARPA is focusing much of its countertenor expertise on a path-breaking enterprise: to use information technology to detect suspicious behavior by potential terrorists-and this is the controversial part-in the world of electronic commerce. The difficulty, as Albert Einstein observed long ago, is that science sometimes offers technological choices that society is not quite morally equipped to make. Even if DARPA's team succeeds in finding a technological silver bullet, a national debate on whether such a system could or should be used in America's open society must surely follow.

The premise underlying the new DARPA initiative-a $100 million effort that involves a handful of specific technology projects within IAO and could grow to $13 37.5 million next year-is that terrorists such as the September 11 hijackers leave tracks: They hold bank accounts, rent cars, buy plane tickets, even take flight lessons. "If terror organizations are going to engage in adverse actions against the United States," Popp explains, "it must involve people and those people will make transactions and those transactions will leave a signature in the information space."

The trick then, is to detect that signature before the potential terrorist acts or even runs afoul of the law by running a red light. For scientists like Poindexter and Popp-Poindexter was trained as a physicist, Popp as an electrical engineer-the problem recalls an earlier technological challenge of Cold War vintage. In submarine warfare, signal-processing techniques were refined so that enemy subs could be detected in the vast ocean. "Instead of trying to find enemy submarines using acoustic signatures in an ocean of noise, we're trying to understand terrorist activity," says Popp. "The ocean of noise is the world of information."

Searching for Sharks

How does DARPA propose to catch the sharks in the sea? The challenge in this new age of terror is that a small number of people-operating across borders and without the backing of a sovereign state-can do grievous damage to innocent lives. After September 11, there was much talk about connecting the dots; if only the FBI had recognized that Arab men were taking flying lessons, for example, the catastrophe might have been averted. This is, as Poindexter noted at a recent DARPA conference, the heart of the matter: "The intelligence collection targets are thousands of people whose identities and whereabouts we do not always know ... One of the problems is to know which dots to connect." The Pentagon's Defense Science Board, in a study on so-called "transnational threats" came to the same conclusion: "The making of connections between otherwise meaningless bits of information is at the core of (transnational) threat analysis," the DSB states. It goes on to add that "search methods currently in use are not up to the challenge."

That is where DARPA hopes to make a contribution. Within IAO are programs looking for technological breakthroughs in a host of fields: strategic analysis tools, knowledge discovery and collaboration tools, biometrics to help identify people, language technologies, data bases, privacy protection, link analysis and data mining, and predictive modeling and estimation. Much of the expertise required to make advances in these areas will come from the computer sciences, software engineering, and artificial intelligence fields.