Controversial surveillance system renamed. (Up front: news, trends & analysis).

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 make available to U.S. agents include financial, education, medical, and housing records. The Pentagon assured Congress, however, that the anti-terror surveillance system will analyze only legally acquired information, including foreign and counter intelligence or artificial data that has been generated to resemble real behavior patterns.

TIA is developing breakthrough software for building a large virtual, centralized database capable of quick mining by counterintelligence officers, even though the data will be held in many places, in many languages, and in many formats, DARPA said. In addition, the Pentagon has financed a research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology that uses a radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk. If DARPA orders a prototype, individuals' "gait signatures" could become part of the data to be linked together as part of the TIA system.

But the name change may not alleviate concerns that TIA may threaten individual privacy. In February, Congress barred the use of the TIA system against American citizens pending further congressional review. Conversely, the Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that advocates online privacy, concluded in a report that there are few legal constraints on government access to commercial databases. It said neither the Constitution nor the Privacy Act protects consumer data held by private companies and other laws are "riddled with exceptions for law enforcement or intelligence uses."