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From: "Mordechai"
To: Declan McCullagh
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 11:53:28 +0200 Subject:
TIA feasability and costs Reply-to: quality@computer.org

Declan,

My name is Mordechai Ben-Menachem. I am a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel. My areas of speciality are software engineering and project management. Bob Bauman asked me to write to you to express certain views concerning the DARPA project called TIA.

I have read the Aldrige testimony. Most of the following was written in reaction to that.

Much of what Aldrige says walks a very narrow line between outright lies and obfuscation. It is simply not correct. The areas for objection are too broad to cover here, but I shall try to give a few examples.

1. You cannot talk about "... if they choose to use it." The system ONLY has value if there is a critical mass of data in it. This means, by definition, that the database must be massively populated and this must be constantly maintained. This is not a situation where one can query and THEN the system will go off to a thousand different databases around the world to search for transactions you may want. There is a fine line here between data collection and data retrieval. The "if they choose" part can relate to data retrieval, but that makes it a very sticky wicket. Existing legal controls (e.g., search warrants, Miranda) are designed to control data collection, not use of that data once it has been collected.

2. Speech recognition / rapid translation: The statements are very misleading. No such software exits today. The state-of-the-art of voice recognition / voice response systems is that of a watch (you can also tell your phone to dial your wife, but only after rigorous training of the system). The accuracy of translation systems used today is mostly used as Computer Science jokes. The distance to workable systems is quite profound. Intel has recently announced a 3 Giga Hertz chip. This infers (via Moore's Law) that we shall see a 6 Giga Hertz chip in 18 months. Many authorities have called 6 GH a milestone that will allow a new set of applications. In other words, when those capabilities exist, we may be able to intelligently discuss rapid, real-time translation. However, by definition, we do not know how to conceive of those applications now. Perhaps it can be on a supercomputer, as cost is not the governing factor -- no, the basic computational complexity may be solvable on a supercomputer (no proof of that exists) but there are many other aspects that requires a different type of architecture for real time usage. He also stated that there will be voice recognition capabilities to recognise who is speaking. Totally science fiction, has never been tried in real life. What exists is the ability to match "voice prints" via pattern recognition techniques. Very time consuming and with a very low level of accuracy and reliability. I do not recall it being recognized by any court, for example.

3. Connections between transactions: Echelon gathers data from some 8-billion telephone conversations today. How successful has this been in the "war on drugs"? The answer is, almost not at all. Add to that, all airline transactions, chemical purchases, credit card ... How many daily transactions are we talking about -- 20 billion, more? (Visa alone has some 110 million transactions per day.) There is no way to even imagine how to query this size of database, much less, make any sense of the answer. In other words, if they manage to simulate the data (we do not know how to simulate that), and if they manage to perform a query, what do we do with the results of such a query? The data visualization techniques do not exist. The quantity of false positives will overload any investigative agency (tens of thousands per day). As a matter of fact, the database technology that would allow this type of query does not exist, either. I must add, on small scales, tens of thousands of transactions, this is being performed. The distance to be able to process five orders of magnitude more is perhaps a decade.

4. Collaborative reasoning: This part is probably practical, though the development is still quite a way off. I have done a little bit of work in this area. (I have an article submitted to a major journal that I can send you, but it has not yet been published.) The major issue here is reliability. We are talking about using massive webs of hierarchical data (that is, the data has both hierarchical attributes and network attributes). With this level of complexity, testing such a system is very far beyond our capabilities -- we simply have no idea how to ensure that the answers we are given are correct because we do not know how to test it. This is not the only difficulty. The definition of interrelationships is an open issue -- they are not static.

As I said, space and time do not permit me to do a full analysis and I have not read the full specification. The bottom line is composed of two points. The report by Pete Aldridge cannot simply be taken at face value. The system / project, as presently defined reminds me greatly of Reagan's SDI project. Brilliantly thought of, but much too early. Some of the fruits of that effort are just now coming on line, 20 years later (e.g., the Arrow anti-ballistic missile and the Nautilus anti-tactical rocket laser gun). When SDI was conceived, it was not technologically possible. This is not today. In 20 years, who knows, this may be reasonable. Today, the base technologies do not exist. The complexity is too great, the size is impossible to conceive. I don't care how passionate Poindexter is. It sounds wrong.

Additionally, I spoke with a colleague of mine whose expertise is in the area of face recognition and other "bio" technologies. My objective was to double-check that my initial guess-timates were reasonable. He confirms and even thought me rather optimistic on some of the things. For instance, "rapid translation" based on speech recognition: I said I thought it a few years off. He says it is AT LEAST 7-10 years off. The capabilities we see today are very primitive.

In any case, we are talking about a 10-20 year timeframe to demonstrate capabilities -- similar to SDI. You are talking about spending billions of dollars for a project to develop a system that has no hope of being useful in a significant time-frame -- the size of the project is much larger than what has been reported, the base technologies do not exist.

best regards, I hope this is helpful and I shall be most pleased to further explain if you like,
Mordechai Ben-Menachem
Dept. of Industrial Engineering & Management
Ben-Gurion University
P. O. Box 5613; Beer-Sheva;
84156; Israel
Tel. 972-86-433231,
mob. 972-57-433231,
off. 972-86-479374
quality@computer.org

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