Feds Sharpen Secret Tools for Data Mining
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 | Justin Bugajski
Big brother may be trying to watch you, but it’s unclear how skilled he is at dealing with the petabytes of information being collected.
Data-mining systems used by intelligence agencies include:
• Hardware and software from NCR subsidiary Teradata that is capable of storing and searching databases as large as 4 million gigabytes, or twice as much information as is held in all research libraries in the USA. Teradata executive Bill Cooper won’t say what’s in the Teradata systems that intelligence agencies use, but he says their applications include searching financial transactions for signs of money laundering.
• A program designed to identify members of terrorist networks and determine the most important members of those networks. Cogito Inc., of Draper, Utah, sold the program to the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies, company executive William Donahoo says.
• Software from Verity Inc. used by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. A 2004 congressional report says DIA’s Verity system includes personally identifiable information about Americans from other agencies and commercial sources.
The five data-mining programs developed under Total Information Awareness are among at least eight TIA projects that have continued since Congress killed TIA in 2003. They include four efforts to create software that searches through mountains of data for evidence of terrorists and three projects that allow intelligence analysts from many different agencies to collaborate on computer networks. A contract to pull all of the new software together into a working system also remained active until at least last year, government records show.
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