Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a mass detection program by the United States Information Awareness Office. It operated under this title from February to May 2003 before being renamed Terrorism Information Awareness.
Based on the concept of predictive policing, TIA was meant to correlate detailed information about people in order to anticipate and prevent terrorist incidents before execution. The program modeled specific information sets in the hunt for terrorists around the globe. Admiral John Poindexter called it a "Manhattan Project for counter-terrorism". According to Senator Ron Wyden, TIA was the "biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States".
Congress defunded the Information Awareness Office in late 2003 after media reports criticized the government for attempting to establish "Total Information Awareness" over all citizens.
Although the program was formally suspended, other government agencies later adopted some of its software with only superficial changes. TIA's core architecture continued development under the code name "Basketball." According to a 2012 New York Times article, TIA's legacy was "quietly thriving" at the National Security Agency (NSA).
Program synopsis
TIA was intended to be a five-year research project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal was to integrate components from previous and new government intelligence and surveillance programs, including Genoa, Genoa II, Genisys, SSNA, EELD, WAE, TIDES, Communicator, HumanID and Bio-Surveillance, with data mining knowledge gleaned from the private sector to create a resource for the intelligence, counterintelligence, and law enforcement communities. These components consisted of information analysis, collaboration, decision-support tools, language translation, data-searching, pattern recognition, and privacy-protection technologies.
TIA research included or planned to include the participation of nine government entities: INSCOM, NSA, DIA, CIA, CIFA, STRATCOM, SOCOM, JFCOM, and JWAC. They were to be able to access TIA's programs through a series of dedicated nodes. INSCOM was to house TIA's hardware in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
Companies contracted to work on TIA included the Science Applications International Corporation, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Schafer Corporation, SRS Technologies, Adroit Systems, CACI Dynamic Systems, ASI Systems International, and Syntek Technologies.
Universities enlisted to assist with research and development included Berkeley, Colorado State, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Cornell, Dallas, GeorgiaTech, Maryland, MIT, and Southampton.
Mission
TIA's goal was to revolutionize the United States' ability to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists and decipher their plans, thereby enabling the U.S. to take timely action to preempt and disrupt terrorist activity.
To that end, TIA was to create a counter-terrorism information system that:
Increases information coverage by an order of magnitude and affords easy scaling
Provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed Automatically queues analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks Supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and mitigating strategies, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of policies and courses of action.
Components
Genoa
Unlike the other program components, Genoa predated TIA and provided a basis for it. Genoa's primary function was intelligence analysis to assist human analysts. It was designed to support both top-down and bottom-up approaches; a policymaker could hypothesize an attack and use Genoa to look for supporting evidence of it or compile pieces of intelligence into a diagram and suggest possible outcomes. Human analysts could then modify the diagram to test various cases.
Genoa was independently commissioned in 1996 and completed in 2002 as scheduled.
Genoa II
While Genoa primarily focused on intelligence analysis, Genoa II aimed to provide means by which computers, software agents, policymakers, and field operatives could collaborate.