To Catch a Terrorist — or Not

By SemanticWeb.com on September 9, 2007 2:41 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Say goodbye to the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) program designed to help catch terrorists that has been in the works by the Department of Homeland Security.

But though that particular program is gone, the idea isn’t going to be forgotten. According to reports, the DHS sees real potential in realizing these ends using some of the new commercial technologies that rely on semantic web standards.

Why did ADVISE die? A House Report earlier this year (109-699) – Making Appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for the Fiscal Year Ending Sept. 30, 2007, and For Other Purposes – describes ADVISE, and some concerns over it, this way:

“The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on terrorists. A prototype is currently available to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens. The conferees understand up to $40,000,000 has been obligated for ADVISE. The ADVISE program plan, total costs and privacy impacts are unclear and therefore the conferees direct the Inspector General to conduct a comprehensive program review and report within nine months of enactment of this Act.”

According to
“Data Sciences Technology for Homeland Security Information Management and Knowledge Discovery” — a report of the DHS Workshop on Data Sciences that was held in September of 2004 and jointly released by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — the system was designed to provide a common platform that supports scalable knowledge management across multiple missions. “At ADVISE’s core, semantic graphs are used to organize the data entities and their relationships…. Hidden relationships in the data are uncovered by examining the structure and properties of the semantic graph.” The report went on to note that a security infrastructure enforces privacy and security policies.

But this March, Homeland Security suspended program testing, at least in part as a result of privacy concerns raised by the Government Accountability Office that an innocent person could mistakenly be associated with terrorism or other criminal activity by the tool. Reports also have it that live data, including personally identifiable information, was used in testing the system, rather than fake information. Oops.

According to the Associated Press, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman said it’s lights out for good for ADVISE — but the lights may turn on elsewhere.

“ADVISE is not expected to be restarted,” the Associated Press quotes spokesman Russ Knocke as saying. He also noted that. DHS’ Science and Technology directorate “determined that new commercial products now offer similar functionality while costing significantly less to maintain than ADVISE,” according to the AP.

It might not be a bad idea in other respects for the DHS to look outside itself when it comes to technology. This week it was also revelaed by the Justice Department’s inspector general that the government’s master terrorist watch list, run by both the DHS and the FBI, has its own problems.

Deficiencies in the watch list includes errors, inaccurate, and missing data that “can increase the risk of not identifying known or suspected terrorist, and it can also increase the risk that innovent persons will be stopped or detained,” according to a statement from the inspector general.

All this tops off a weekin which the threat of terrorism against American targets again raised its head, with German authorities foiling a terrorism attack and the U.S. embassy in Africa warning American citizens in Nigeria that U.S. and western interests are at risk there.

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