The New Thought Police:
The NSA Wants to Know How You Think—
Maybe Even What You Think
by James Bamford
The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that
George Orwell's Thought Police might have found useful: an
artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into
what people are thinking.
With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a
brain, the device will be able to respond almost
instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence
analysts. As more and more data is collected—through
phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like
Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation,
Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll
records—it may one day be possible to know not just
where people are and what they are doing, but what and how
they think.
The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one
researcher has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in
placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret
agency with little accountability.
Getting Aquaint
Known as Aquaint, which stands for "Advanced QUestion
Answering for INTelligence," the project was run for many
years by John Prange, an NSA scientist at the Advanced
Research and Development Activity. Headquartered in Room 12A69
in the NSA's Research and Engineering Building at 1 National
Business Park, ARDA was set up by the agency to serve as a
sort of intelligence community DARPA, the place where former
Reagan national security advisor John Poindexter's infamous
Total Information Awareness project was born. [Editor's note:
TIA was a short-lived project founded in 2002 to apply
information technology to counter terrorist and other threats
to national security.] Later named the Disruptive Technology
Office, ARDA has now morphed into the Intelligence Advanced
Research Projects Activity (IARPA).
A sort of national laboratory for eavesdropping and other
spycraft, IARPA will move into its new 120,000-square-foot
home in 2009. The building will be part of the new M Square
Research Park in College Park, Maryland. A mammoth two
million-square-foot, 128-acre complex, it is operated in
collaboration with the University of Maryland. "Their budget
is classified, but I understand it's very well funded," said
Brian Darmody, the University of Maryland's assistant vice
president of research and economic development, referring to
IARPA. "They'll be in their own building here, and they're
going to grow. Their mission is expanding."
If IARPA is the spy world's DARPA, Aquaint may be the
reincarnation of Poindexter's TIA. After a briefing by NSA
Director Michael Hayden, Vice President Dick Cheney, and CIA
Director George Tenet of some of the NSA's data mining
programs in July 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller IV, the vice
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a
concerned letter to Cheney. "As I reflected on the meeting
today," he said, "John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to
mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the
administration is moving with regard to security, technology,
and surveillance."
Building "Hal"
The original goal of Aquaint, which dates back to the 1990s,
was simply to develop a sophisticated method of picking the
right needles out of a vast haystack of information and coming
up with the answer to a question. As with TIA, many
universities were invited to contribute brainpower to the
project. But in the aftermath of the attacks on 9/11, with the
creation of the NSA's secret warrantless eavesdropping program
and the buildup of massive databases, the project began taking
on a more urgent tone.
"Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most memorable
character, HAL 9000. We are building HAL."
In a 2004 pilot project, a mass of data was gathered from news
stories taken from the New York Times, the AP news
wire, and the English portion of the Chinese Xinhua news wire
covering 1998 to 2000. Then, 13 U.S. military intelligence
analysts searched the data and came up with a number of
scenarios based on the material. Finally, using those
scenarios, an NSA analyst developed 50 topics, and in each of
those topics created a series of questions for Aquaint's
computerized brain to answer. "Will the Japanese use force to
defend the Senkakus?" was one. "What types of disputes or
conflict between the PLA [People's Liberation Army] and Hong
Kong residents have been reported?" was another. And "Who were
the participants in this spy ring, and how are they related to
each other?" was a third. Since then, the NSA has attempted to
build both on the complexity of the system—more
essay-like answers rather than yes or no—and on
attacking greater volumes of data.
"The technology behaves like a robot, understanding and
answering complex questions," said a former Aquaint
researcher. "Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the
most memorable character, HAL 9000, having a conversation with
David. We are essentially building this system. We are
building HAL." A naturalized U.S. citizen who received her
Ph.D. from Columbia, the researcher worked on the program for
several years but eventually left due to moral concerns. "The
system can answer the question, 'What does X think about Y?'"
she said. "Working for the government is great, but I don't
like looking into other people's secrets. I am interested in
helping people and helping physicians and patients for the
quality of people's lives." The researcher now focuses on
developing similar search techniques for the medical
community.
Thought policeman
A supersmart search engine, capable of answering complex
questions such as "What were the major issues in the last 10
presidential elections?" would be very useful for the public.
But that same capability in the hands of an agency like the
NSA—absolutely secret, often above the law, resistant to
oversight, and with access to petabytes of private information
about Americans—could be a privacy and civil liberties
nightmare. "We must not forget that the ultimate goal is to
transfer research results into operational use," said Aquaint
project leader John Prange, in charge of information
exploitation for IARPA.
Once up and running, the database of old newspapers could
quickly be expanded to include an inland sea of personal
information scooped up by the agency's warrantless data
suction hoses. Unregulated, they could ask it to determine
which Americans might likely pose a security risk—or
have sympathies toward a particular cause, such as the antiwar
movement, as was done during the 1960s and 1970s. The Aquaint
robospy might then base its decision on the type of books a
person purchased online, or chat room talk, or websites
visited—or a similar combination of data. Such a system
would have an enormous chilling effect on everyone's everyday
activities—what will the Aquaint computer think if I buy
this book, or go to that website, or make this comment? Will I
be suspected of being a terrorist or a spy or a subversive?
Controlling brain waves
Collecting information, however, has always been far less of a
problem for the NSA than understanding it, and that means
knowing the language. To expand its linguistic capabilities,
the agency established another new organization, the Center
for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), and housed it in a
building near IARPA at the M Square Research Park. But far
from simply learning the meaning of foreign words, CASL, like
Aquaint, attempts to find ways to get into someone's mind and
understand what he or she is thinking.
One area of study is to attempt to determine if people are
lying simply by watching their behavior and listening to them
speak. According to one CASL document, "Many deception cues
are difficult to identify, particularly when they are subtle,
such as changes in verb tense or extremely brief facial
expressions. CASL researchers are studying these cues in
detail with advanced measurement and statistical analysis
techniques in order to recommend ways to identify deceptive
cue combinations."
Like something out of a B-grade sci-fi movie, CASL is even
training employees to control their own brain waves.
Another area of focus explores the "growing need to work with
foreign text that is incomplete," such as partly deciphered
messages or a corrupted hard drive or the intercept of only
one side of a conversation. The center is thus attempting to
find ways to prod the agency's cipher-brains to fill in the
missing blanks. "In response," says the report, "CASL's
cognitive neuroscience team has been studying the cognitive
basis of working memory's capacity for filling in incomplete
areas of text. They have made significant headway in this
research by using a powerful high-density electroencephalogram
(EEG) machine acquired in 2006." The effort is apparently
directed at discovering what parts of the brain are used when
very good cryptanalysts are able to guess correctly the
missing words and phrases in a message.
Like something out of a B-grade sci-fi movie, CASL is even
trying to turn dull minds into creative geniuses by training
employees to control their own brain waves: "The cognitive
neuroscience team has also been researching divergent
thinking: creative, innovative and flexible thinking valuable
for language work. They are exploring ways to improve
divergent thinking using the EEG and neurobiological feedback.
A change in brain-wave activity is believed to be critical for
generating creative ideas, so the team trains its subjects to
change their brain-wave activity."
