Controversial surveillance system renamed.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: Up front: news, trends & analysis - Total Information Awareness now Terrorism Information Awareness

The Total Information Awareness program under development by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been renamed the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program.

DARPA said the old name "created in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens." The goal, according to DARPA, is "to protect U.S. citizens by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats before an attack," and it stated that the new name was chosen "to make this objective absolutely clear."

Through TIA, DARPA is developing software data-mining tools that can give U.S. agents fingertip access to government and commercial records from around the world that could fill the Library of Congress more than 50 times. The library's collection of 18 million books would be dwarfed by the size of the computerized files the government wants to search for behavior patterns that may help predict future terrorist attacks. DARPA has said that the amounts of data, measured in petabytes, that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented. A byte is the electronic representation of one letter of the alphabet, and a petrabyte is a quadrillion--1,000,000,000,000,000--bytes. Most personal computers now come with storage space for 2 to 20 gigabytes of information. A petabyte is 1 million times larger than a gigabyte. If TIA files are all text, one petabyte would contain enough room for almost 40 pages of information on each of the world's more than 6.2 billion people.

TIA's goal is to predict terrorist actions by analyzing such transactions as passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, car rentals, airline ticket purchases, arrests, or suspicious activities. Other databases DARPA wants to...