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Information Awareness Office

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DARPA division overseeing the "Total Information Awareness" program

Information Awareness Office seal[1][2] (motto: lat. scientia est potentia – knowledge is power[3])

Part of a series onGlobal surveillance<br>Disclosures<br>Origins

Pre-2013

Snowden

Reactions

Systems<br>List of government mass surveillance projects

XKeyscore

PRISM

ECHELON

Sentient

Carnivore

Dishfire

Stone Ghost

Tempora

Frenchelon

Fairview

MYSTIC

DCSN

Boundless Informant

Bullrun

Pinwale

Stingray

SORM

RAMPART-A

Mastering the Internet

Jindalee Operational Radar Network

Selected agencies<br>FVEY<br>ASD

CSE

GCSB

GCHQ

NSA

BND

BSSN

CNI

DIH

DGSE

KGB

MSS

JSCU

Secret police

Spetssvyaz

Unit 8200

Places<br>The Doughnut

Fort Meade

Menwith Hill

Pine Gap

Southern Cross Cable

Utah Data Center

Bad Aibling Station

Dagger Complex

GCHQ Bude

Laws<br>Five Eyes<br>UKUSA Agreement

Lustre

U.S.<br>USA Freedom Act

FISA amendments

EU<br>Data Retention Directive

Data Protection Directive

GDPR

China<br>National Intelligence Law

Cybersecurity Law

UK<br>Investigatory Powers Act 2016

Proposed changes<br>U.S.<br>FISA Improvements Act

Other proposals

Concepts<br>Mass surveillance<br>Corporate

Industry

Culture of fear

Secure communication

Security sector governance and reform

SIGINT

Call detail record

Surveillance issues in smart cities

Surveillance abuse

Related topics<br>Intelligence field

Espionage

Intelligence agency

Cryptography<br>Tor

VPNs

TLS

Human rights<br>Privacy

Liberty

Satellites

Stop Watching Us

Nothing to hide argument

The Information Awareness Office (IAO ) was established by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security by achieving "Total Information Awareness" (TIA).[4][5][6]

It was achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant.[7] The information was then analyzed for suspicious activities, connections between individuals, and "threats".[8] The program also included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras and other methods.[8]

Following public criticism that the technology's development and deployment could lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continued to be funded under different names, as revealed by Edward Snowden during the course of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures.[5][6][9][10][11][12]

History<br>[edit]

Diagram of Total Information Awareness system, taken from official (decommissioned) Information Awareness Office website (click to enlarge)

The IAO was established after Admiral John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, and SAIC executive Brian Hicks approached the US Department of Defense with the idea for an information awareness program after the attacks of September 11, 2001.[11]

Poindexter and Hicks had previously worked together on intelligence-technology programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA agreed to host the program and appointed Poindexter to run it in 2002.

The IAO began funding research and development of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program in February 2003 but renamed the program the Terrorism Information Awareness Program in May that year after an adverse media reaction to the program's implications for public surveillance. Although TIA was only one of several IAO projects, many critics and news reports conflated TIA with other related research projects of the IAO, with the result that TIA came in popular usage to stand for an entire subset of IAO programs.

The TIA program itself was the "systems-level" program of the IAO that intended to integrate information technologies into a prototype system to provide tools to better detect, classify, and identify potential terrorists with the goal to increase the probability that authorized agencies of the United States could preempt adverse actions.[13]

As a systems-level program of programs, TIA's goal was the creation of a "counter-terrorism information architecture" that integrated technologies from other IAO programs (and elsewhere, as appropriate). The TIA program was researching, developing, and integrating technologies to virtually aggregate data, to follow...