The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is building a new intelligence analysis system known as Tangram to search large, diverse sets of intelligence data looking to “connect the dots” and find previously unknown terrorist activity.

Privacy experts are, of course, deeply concerned about the program’s complete lack of privacy protection.

The Tangram system is intended to dramatically speed up intelligence analysis “by two orders of magnitude (100 x)” as well as deliver higher quality intelligence and to “improve the detection of low observable threats and events where guilt by association assumptions may not apply,” according to an unclassified proposer’s information packet (Microsoft Word) regarding the program.

The document is quite interesting in its analysis of intelligence challenges in connecting the dots and finding terrorists. For instance: “To date the predominant approaches have used a guilt-by-association model to derive suspicion scores. In cases where we have knowledge of a seed entity in an unknown group we have been very successful at detecting the entire group. However, in the absence of a known seed entity, how do we score a person if nothing is known about their associates? In such an instance guilt-by-association fails.”

Intelligence and privacy experts who reviewed the document said that it reaffirms their long-held belief that many computerized terrorist-profiling methods are largely ineffective. It also raises significant privacy concerns, because to distinguish terrorists from innocent people, a system that’s as broad as Tangram purports to be would require access to many databases that contain private information about Americans, the experts said, including credit card transactions, communications records, and even Internet purchases.

“There is no other way that they could do this,” said David Holtzman, former chief technology officer of Network Solutions, the company that runs the Internet’s domain-naming system, and author of the book Privacy Lost. “They want to investigate real-time ways of spotting patterns” that might indicate terrorist activity, he said. “Telephone calls, for instance, would be an obvious thing you’d feed into this.”

The Tangram document doesn’t mention privacy protections or a process for monitoring the system’s use to guard against abuse. In an interview, Tim Edgar, the deputy civil-liberties protection officer for the national intelligence director, said that Tangram “is a research-and-development program. We have been assured that it’s not deployed for operational use.”

Asked whether the intelligence used to test Tangram contains information about U.S. persons, defined as U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens, Edgar said, “It’s not being tested with any data that has unminimized information about U.S. persons in it.” Minimization procedures are used by intelligence agencies to expunge people’s names from official reports and replace them with an anonymous designation, such as U.S. Person No. 1.

Tangram is being tested “only with synthetic data or foreign-intelligence data already being used by analysts that meet Defense Department guidelines for handling of U.S. person information,” Edgar said. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence “has not funded and is not planning to fund any contracts for the Tangram program using unminimized data with U.S. persons in it,” he said. — National Journal

Technology experts also noted the program’s derivation from Total Information Awareness, an intelligence program which Congress publicly killed but which has been living on in secret by other names. “With one big difference: no privacy protections,” notes national security reporter Shane Harris. The Tangram document names several of them and notes that it will build on them, creating a system which is capable of reasoning out for itself the best way to analyze a particular set of data.

The full article is well worth reading.

Wired News reporter Ryan Singel notes that the document refers to a supposedly defunct program, TIPS, as actually being active. “For those who don’t recall, TIPS was a database system proposed by then Attorney General John Ashcroft that would collect terrorism reports from meter readers, post office employees and the cable guy,” Singel wrote. “Congress killed that program off too. Or did they?”

Officials have been very careful to say that this technology won’t be used on American citizens, and is years away from being operational anyway. But without privacy protections built into the system, and without oversight from Congress, how can we be sure?