ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement) was a research and development program within the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Threat and Vulnerability Testing and Assessment (TVTA) portfolio.
The program was reportedly developing a massive data mining system, which would collect and analyze data on everyone in the United States and perform a "threat analysis" on them. The data would have been anything from financial records, phone records, emails, blog entries, website searches, to any other electronic information that can be put into a computer system. This information would then be analyzed and used to monitor social threats such as community-forming, terrorism, political organizing, or crime. The program was planned for the storage of one quadrillion data entities.
The exact scope and degree of completion of ADVISE was unclear. The program was in the 2004–2006 Federal DHS Budget as a component of the $47 million TVTA program. It was officially scrapped in September 2007 after the agency's internal inspector general found that pilot testing of the system had been performed using data on real people without required privacy safeguards in place.
See also Data warehouse Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) ECHELON Information Awareness Office NSA warrantless surveillance controversy TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice)
References
External links US plans massive data sweep, February 9, 2006 article by Mark Clayton in the Christian Science Monitor Data Sciences Technology for Homeland Security Information Management and Knowledge Discovery, report of the Department of Homeland Security Workshop on Data Sciences conducted September 22–23, 2004, released in January 2005 by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. See pages 7–8. Information to Insight in a Counterterrorism Context, report on ADVISE prepared for the US Department of Energy by Robert Burleson of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the University of California Threat & Vulnerability, Testing & Assessment - $47M, page 23 of Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Brief for the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directory, by Parney Albright, March 1, 2005 ADVISE at SourceWatch