In reality, agencies like the National Reconnaissance Office and National Security Agency are old hands at data mining, and now the year-old Northern Command will use it, too. Moreover, data-mining tools used by national intelligence agencies already are in the hands of domestic law enforcement.

The kind of tools being transferred from U.S. Space Command to Northern Command, and from there to the Department of Homeland Security, shows both the common technology base for all environments and the possible civil-liberties concerns inherent in such tech transfers.

Gen. Ed Eberhart, who leads the Northern Command, was familiar with the major contractors working on intelligence tools from his days as head of Space Command. Representatives from Northern Command insisted last fall that respect for civil liberties was foremost among their concerns. However, when Eberhart spoke before the National Space Symposium in April , he said that better intelligence coordination with state and local police forces was one of his chief goals.

The NRO and NSA use commercial database tools from large companies like Oracle and Microsoft and specialized pattern-recognition tools from smaller companies such as ChoicePoint and Groove Networks. Defense contractors are responsible for pulling such tools together in software suites that would prove useful to intelligence agencies. Many were working with the Department of Homeland Security's constituent agencies before DHS formed at the end of last year. They are deploying the tools for domestic drug enforcement and counterterrorism duties today, through the channels of Northern Command and DHS.

Northrop-Grumman showed one such tool at the Space Symposium. The Web-Enabled Temporal Analysis System, or WebTAS, was developed in conjunction with the Air Force Research Labs and used during the Iraq campaign. It is now being offered to regional police intelligence coalitions, through the auspices of DHS.

WebTAS displays maps generated by popular geospatial tools and shows links corresponding to relations among targets. Clicking on a link calls up related data-bases that can tell an analyst, for example, all of the calls that the target has made in the last few days.

To pick up patterns that might be buried in the noise of too much information, an embedded behavioral-correlation engine that operates in near-real-time predicts possible trends for developing situations and flags circumstances that may be problems or focus points for more intelligence gathering in the future.

By: DocMemory
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