Report to Congress regarding the 

Terrorism Information Awareness Program 

In response to Consolidated Appropriations Resolution, 2003, Pub. L. 

No. 108-7, Division M, § 111(b) 

Executive Summary 

May 20, 2003 
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Terrorism Information Awareness Program 

Preface

The Consolidated Appropriations Resolution, 2003, Pub. L. No. 108-7, 

Division M, § 111(b) provides for the submission of a report to Congress, 

within 90 days of the President’s signing the law, regarding the Total 

Information Awareness program, now called the Terrorism Information 

Awareness (TIA) program, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 

(DARPA) research and development program initiated in the aftermath of 

the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. 

Executive Summary

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is charged with conducting 

research and development for the Department of Defense (DoD). By doing so, DARPA 

furnishes DoD with leading-edge technologies to help the department execute its critical national 

security mission. DARPA often produces prototype systems for conducting experiments that 

address the urgent needs of DoD. If successful and as appropriate, such prototype systems 

would be transitioned into operational use by executing agencies of the government. 

Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA)1 is such a prototype system/network. It is a research 

and development program that will integrate advanced collaborative and decision support tools; 

language translation; and data search, pattern recognition, and privacy protection technologies 

into an experimental prototype network focused on combating terrorism through better analysis 

and decision making. If successful, and if deployed, this program of programs would provide 

decision- and policy-makers with advance actionable information and knowledge about terrorist 

planning and preparation activities that would aid in making informed decisions to prevent future 

international terrorist attacks against the United States at home or abroad. In short, DoD’s aim in 

TIA is to seek to make a significant leap in technology to help those working to “connect the 

dots” of terrorist-related activity. A TIA-like system/network could provide the defense and 

intelligence communities with tools and methods to solve many of the problems that have been 

identified in the aftermath of the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001,2

 and 

that are related to improving information analysis in our continuing war against terrorism. 

 

1 Previously known as Total Information Awareness, this name created in some minds the impression that TIA was 

a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens. That is not DoD’s intent in pursuing this program. 

Rather, DoD’s purpose in pursuing these efforts is to protect U.S. citizens by detecting and defeating foreign 

terrorist threats before an attack. To make this objective absolutely clear, DARPA has changed the program name to 

Terrorism Information Awareness.

2

 Final Report of the Joint SSCI/HPSCI Inquiry into the Events of 9/11/01 dated Dec 10, 2002. 
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DoD’s TIA research and development is aimed at providing capabilities to 

users/analysts/operators to addresses a perennial array of problems that have beset analysis of 

complex threats, including sharing data across agency boundaries and exploiting both classified 

and unclassified information, in a more systematic fashion. 

These problems exist in part because of a lack of applied technology to aid the human processes. 

Today, the amount of information that needs to be considered far exceeds the capacity of the unaided humans in the system. Adding more people is not necessarily the solution. DoD believes 

that there is a need to provide a much more systematic, methodological approach that automates 

many of the lower-level data manipulation tasks that can be done well by machines guided by 

human users. Such an approach would, in turn, allow users more time for higher-level analysis 

that depends critically on a human’s unique cognitive skills. 

TIA is one of several research and development programs in DARPA’s Information Awareness 

Office (IAO), which was established in January 2002. In the aftermath of the September 11 

terrorist attacks, DARPA formed IAO in part to bring together, under the leadership of one 

technical office director, several existing DARPA programs focused on applying information 

technology to combat terrorist threats. DARPA also recognized that new programs would be 

needed to fully address the technology requirements of a complete prototype system/network to 

respond to the particular demands of the terrorist threat. DARPA envisions TIA as the system/ 

network-level integration program while other IAO programs are designed to furnish 

technologies and components that compose the overall program. As conceived by DARPA, TIA 

would integrate these technologies and provide some or all of them to various organizations for 

experiments, while assessing the system’s utility in various operationally relevant contexts. 

The TIA research and development program began in FY 2003. Funding for FY 2003 through 

FY 2005 as proposed in the FY 2004 President’s Budget submission is $53,752,000. A number 

of organizations in the DoD and Intelligence Community have shown great interest in working 

with the TIA program to test and evaluate technologies. 

DARPA provides a system/network infrastructure and concepts; software analytical tools; 

software installation; training; software performance evaluation; and integration and evaluation 

of user comments on modifications and additions to the software. Participating organizations 

from DoD and the Intelligence Community provide facilities and personnel to evaluate these 

products and use data currently available to them under existing laws, regulations and policies. 

Five major investigation threads are currently being pursued as a part of TIA and are driving 

much of the development and experimental activity in the TIA program. These five threads are: 

secure collaborative problem solving, structured discovery with security, link and group 

understanding, context aware visualization, and decision making with corporate memory. 

• Secure Collaborative Problem Solving. A collaborative environment is sought that 

would enable ad hoc groups to quickly form within and across agency boundaries to 

bring relevant data, diverse points of view, and experience together to solve the 

complex problems associated with countering terrorism. 
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• Structured Discovery with Sources and Methods Security. A wide range of 

intelligence data, both classified and open source, may need to be searched to find 

relevant information for understanding the terrorist intent. DARPA believes that to 

have any hope of making sense of this wide range of data, a more structured and 

automated way of approaching the problem is needed. 

• Link and Group Understanding. One of the characteristics of the terrorist threat is 

that terrorist organizational structures are not well understood and are purposefully 

designed to conceal their connections and relationships. IAO is researching software 

that can discover linkages among people, places, things, and events related to possible 

terrorist activity. 

• Context Aware Visualization. DARPA believes that better ways are needed to 

visualize information than text-based lists, tables, and long passages of unstructured 

text. Such visualization concepts should respond to a broad range of potential users 

with wholly different roles and responsibilities. 

• Decision Making with Corporate Memory. Decision-makers must consider a full 

range of possible options to deal with complex asymmetric threats, particularly in 

light of rapidly changing circumstances. DARPA’s activities in this area are 

premised on the view that understanding how certain decisions played out in the past 

is critical to formulating current decision options. 

The TIA program is a research and development project. The program is integrating and testing 

information technology tools. DARPA affirms that TIA’s research and testing activities are only 

using data and information that is either (a) foreign intelligence and counter intelligence 

information legally obtained and usable by the Federal Government under existing law, or (b) 

wholly synthetic (artificial) data that has been generated, for research purposes only, to resemble 

and model real-world patterns of behavior . 

The Department of Defense, which is responsible for DARPA, has expressed its full 

commitment to planning, executing, and overseeing the TIA program in a manner that protects 

privacy and civil liberties. Safeguarding the privacy and the civil liberties of Americans is a 

bedrock principle. DoD intends to make it a central element in the Department of Defense’s 

management and oversight of the TIA program. 

The Department of Defense’s TIA research and development efforts address both privacy and 

civil liberties in the following ways: 

• The Department of Defense must fully comply with the laws and regulations 

governing intelligence activities and all other laws that protect the privacy and 

constitutional rights of U.S. persons. 

• As an integral part of its research, the TIA program itself is seeking to develop new 

technologies that will safeguard the privacy of U.S. persons. 
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• TIA’s research and testing activities are conducted using either real intelligence 

information that the federal government has already legally obtained, or artificial 

synthetic information that, ipso facto, does not implicate the privacy interests of U.S. 

persons. 

The report does not recommend any changes in statutory laws, but instead contemplates that any 

deployment of TIA’s search tools may occur only to the extent that such a deployment is 

consistent with current law. Accordingly, the report specifically notes that the strictures of 

current law protecting certain categories and sources of information may well constrain or (as a 

logistical matter) completely preclude deployment of TIA search tools with respect to such data. 

Moreover, to the extent that TIA research and development technology is ever applied to data 

sources that contain information on U.S. persons, the privacy issues raised by these tools are 

significant ones that will require careful and serious examination. Because TIA is still largely in 

the research stage, any analysis of these issues is necessarily tentative and preliminary. Several 

factors would need to be considered in evaluating TIA’s suitability for deployment in particular 

contexts. 

• The efficacy and accuracy of TIA’s search tools must be stress-tested and 

demonstrated. The tools must be shown to be sufficiently precise and accurate – i.e., 

a search query results in only that information that is responsive to the query. 

DARPA has expressed its commitment to the necessary testing to ensure the 

technological accuracy of TIA’s search tools. 

• It is critical that there be built-in operational safeguards to reduce the opportunities 

for abuse. DARPA is already researching whether and how it may be able to build in 

controls that, at an architectural level, would govern the TIA program tools. Among 

the controls being researched are automated audit trails to document who accessed the 

system and how it was used during the session; anonymization of sources of data and 

of the persons mentioned in the underlying data, so that these data could not be 

revealed unless it is lawful and warranted; selective revelation of data, so that 

additional permissions would need to be obtained in order to receive additional data; 

and rigorous access controls and permissioning techniques. TIA’s ultimate suitability 

for particular purposes will depend heavily upon DARPA’s success on these 

technological issues. 

• It will also be essential to ensure that substantial security measures are in place to 

protect these tools from unauthorized access by hackers or other intruders. Some of 

these measures must be built-in at the architectural level; others will involve the 

adoption of policies that prescribe who may have access, for what purposes, and in 

what manner. 

• Any agency contemplating deploying TIA tools for use in particular contexts will be 

required first to conduct a pre-deployment legal review. In this regard, the DoD 

General Counsel has directed each operational component within DoD that hosts TIA 

technologies to prepare a substantive legal review that examines the relationship 
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between that component and TIA, and analyzes the legal issues raised by the 

underlying program to which the TIA tools will be applied. The General Counsel has 

advised that all such relationships should be documented in a memorandum of 

agreement to ensure the relationship is clearly understood by all parties. The DCI’s 

General Counsel is taking comparable steps with respect to elements of the 

Intelligence Community, and the Department of Justice would do so if it ever decides 

to deploy any TIA technology. 

• There will be a need for any user agency to adopt policies establishing effective oversight

of the actual use and operation of the system before it is deployed in particular contexts. 

There must be clear and effective accountability for misuse of the system. 

As DARPA endeavors to achieve these technological developments, the Secretary of Defense 

will, as an integral part of oversight of TIA research and development, continue to assess 

emerging potential privacy and civil liberties impacts through an oversight board composed of 

senior representatives from DoD and the Intelligence Community, and chaired by the Under 

Secretary of Defense (Acquisition, Technology and Logistics). The Secretary of Defense will 

also receive advice on legal and policy issues, including privacy, posed by TIA research and 

development from a Federal Advisory Committee composed of outside experts. 

The Department of Defense has expressed its intention to address privacy and civil liberties 

issues squarely as they arise, in specific factual and operational contexts and in full partnership 

with other Executive Branch agencies and the Congress. The protection of privacy and civil 

liberties is an integral and paramount goal in the development of counterterrorism technologies 

and in their implementation. If these technologies can be developed, the privacy and civil 

liberties issues noted above would have to be carefully considered and resolved in advance of 

deployment.