Intelligence and Privacy

Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC)

Although Congress has taken steps to prevent deployment of TIA without congressional authorization, a new initiative with a much lower profile, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), has the potential to achieve the same invasions of privacy without transgressing those new legislative restrictions. The TTIC initiative was announced by the White House on January 28, 2003, and has been described as "a multi-agency joint venture that integrates and analyzes terrorist-threat related information, collected domestically or abroad, and disseminates information and analysis to appropriate recipients." TTIC's mission is to "serve as the central hub to provide and receive [counterterrorism] information." In order to achieve this goal, TTIC has the extraordinary power to task elements of all the federal intelligence and security agencies (including DHS, FBI, CIA, and the Defense Department) with the collection of information for analysis by TTIC. As TTIC's director has stated:

[A]nalysts assigned from the other TTIC partner organizations [Justice Department, FBI, DHS, Defense Department, State Department, and CIA] have exceptionally broad access to intelligence. Within TTIC, there is desktop access to all partner agency networks. result[ing] in unprecedented sharing of information. critical to. federal, state, local, and law enforcement entities.

Thus far, the executive has provided few details about the type of information that TTIC will task, receive, and analyze. This worries privacy advocates such as Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who fears that TTIC may be an attempt to "duck all those [TIA-related] questions and go ahead with programs that don't have any connection to Poindexter and get away from the swamp that TIA is in." Indeed, TTIC Director John Brennan has expressed enthusiasm for the TIA program and confidence in its privacy protections. According to Mr. Brennan, discussions are already underway between TTIC and DARPA about making parts of the TIA program work for TTIC. Tien's concerns are shared by David Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who observed that TTIC is "potentially a huge repository of information concerning American citizens.. There's nothing in what has been made publicly available that would contain a limitation on such collection." TTIC will "[h]ave unfettered access to all intelligence information - from raw reports to finished analytic assessments - available to the U.S. government," and will "be able to reach back to its participating parent agencies' base resources as necessary to meet its extraordinary requirements." This means that TTIC will "integrate information from the federal, state and local level as well as the private sector."

TTIC raises further privacy concerns because it has been placed under the control of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). The DCI serves as the head of CIA and of the aggregate U.S. intelligence services. Although TTIC is not part of CIA, placing TTIC, and its ability to command collection of information by other agencies, under the control of the DCI may make available to CIA the "police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions" that are statutorily forbidden to it under the National Security Act. Further, while TTIC is under the control of the DCI rather than DHS, its authority will not be subject to the crucial oversight provisions of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The Homeland Security Act assigned the task of coordinating and analyzing terrorism-threat information to DHS, which is subject to numerous statutory oversight procedures not applicable to TTIC. If TTIC were housed within DHS, TTIC's authority would be limited by DHS' statutory charter, and TTIC's power would be constrained by congressional budgetary control, as well as by DHS' civil rights and privacy officers. As structured, TTIC is subject to no such restraints. TTIC, in short, seems to assume duties that Congress explicitly allotted to DHS, without adopting the oversight controls that Congress provided for DHS.