The Hunting of the Snark

The more you hear about Total Information Awareness, the more it sounds like jabberwocky.

By Scott Berinato

May 21, 2003 — CSO — Set aside for a moment the important but eternally debatable issues surrounding the John Poindexter-led effort to sic information technology on terrorists, known as Total Information Awareness, or TIA. Ignore the Orwell factor for the present. Leave the ethics of behavior surveillance out of it for now. Just forget all that and then look at TIA, the project, again. What do you have?

Nonsense. A program that wastes money and puts little if any logic into the important cause of defending a nation against terrorism. In fact, TIA aggressively defies common sense, the way a Lewis Carroll poem does.

To wit, it's a security program that ignores the basics of risk analysis. Instead of intelligently decreasing the size of the haystack to make spotting needles easier, it actually creates one giant haystack and then tags anything that looks like maybe it could be a needle. But in a haystack that big, a lot of innocent straws of hay will look like needles to the dumb automatonic eye of a database. When you analyze a billion credit card transactions, patterns happen. There would be a colossal amount of false positives.

TIA is also an IT project that embraces the very things that historically make IT projects fail, like massiveness, Byzantine integration, and centralization. All of the software project management wisdom notes a direct correlation between project size and project success. Small projects do better. It can be said with confidence that big software projects fail much more than half of the time while costing more money than budgeted and delivering fewer features than promised. This doesn't even take into account that this particular project is trying to do new and complex tasks with software, some of which have never been tried or have barely been invented.

Which leads to TIA's third pillar of illogic: It seems intent on developing cool technologies and then finding a problem for them to solve, rather than developing technology to solve a problem. For example, TIA sinks resources into developing a biometric system, according to a recent AP story, that can identify potential baddies by the uniqueness of their walk, even thoughand this doesn't take an entire intelligence community to figure outwe seem to have had much more of a problem with driving, flying and floating terrorists than walking ones.

Jabberwocky! Why is an administration that's hell-bent on letting market forces determine the security of our critical infrastructure also hell-bent on controlling TIA at the federal level like it were a New Deal program? This makes less sense than The Lobster Quadrille.

Regardless of how one feels about the (grave or overrated, depending on one's view) cultural issues, TIA looks like a dog. You have to think it's just not going to work.

Or, as Lewis Carroll wrote,

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found

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