ADVISE

ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement) is a "research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old 'Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment' portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year," Mark Clayton reported in the February 9, 2006, Christian Science Monitor.

ADVISE is "at the core" of a "massive computer system" "being developed by the US government ... that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity," Clayton wrote.

"The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But," Clayton wrote, "by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy."

Lee Tien, a "staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that programs like ADVISE "are about connecting" the dots of the "traces" we leave behind everywhere, "analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about, ... as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling," Clayton said.

"A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or 'dataveillance,' as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit-card issuers use data-mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity.

"What sets ADVISE apart is its scope," Clayton reported. "It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as 'entities' - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.

"But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.," Clayton wrote.

Related SourceWatch Resources

• domestic spying
• George W. Bush's domestic spying
• Government Information Awareness
• Information Awareness Office (IAO)
• Intelligence Community
• internet surveillance
• Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD)
• Office of Net Assessment
• Total Information Awareness (TIA)

External Links

U.S. Government Documents

• Robert Burleson, "Image to Insight in a Counterterrorism Context," Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 2005 (23-page pdf).
• DHS Science and Technology Directorate FY 2006 Budget Brief, March 1, 2005 (49-page pdf).

Articles & Commentary

• Mark Clayton, "US plans massive data sweep. Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?" Christian Science Monitor, February 9, 2006.