The PRODIGAL Son of DARPA’s Warrantless Surveillance Net

Activist Post
December 9, 2011

Leave it to one of the most bloated agencies of the U.S. government to name its latest snoop initiative PRODIGAL; it literally means “characterized by profuse or wasteful expenditure.”

The latest multi-millions being spent by the bankrupt U.S. is a security research project that has the capability of analyzing 250,000,000 pieces of person-to-person digital communications per day.

The program is being initially tested as a monitoring device for “rogue” federal employees.

The DARPA-sponsored program, led by Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), will search key words and anomalous file activity that could be predictive of subversive “extreme” intent.

SAIC also “delivers end-to-end solutions” for new electric smart grids. The company is owned and operated by the military-industrial complex; their Chairman is from Lockheed, and their CEO is from BAE Systems.

DARPA insists that this is an internal program and one that is incapable of being applied across the Web. This assurance seems disingenuous as the Internet itself is a military creation. Moreover, systems such as Carnivore and ECHELON already have raised the hackles of privacy lovers for their stated capabilities, which extend well beyond federal or military surveillance targets.

According to David Bader, a principal investigator on the project who reported to FOX News:

Every time someone logs on or off, sends an email or text, touches a file or plugs in a USB key, these records are collected within the organization.

Bader explains in the interview below that their program ADAMS, which analyzes massive sets of data, is looking for officials who may be “breaking bad”, but he claims that no spying is taking place:

The announcement of a search program to identify extreme thought within the government comes at an interesting time, as it was also announced today that the U.S. Military is now a prime target for home-grown terrorism.

Read full article

This article was posted: Friday, December 9, 2011 at 4:06 pm

---

---

---

---