Total Information Awareness -- Don't be afraid, be ready!

A controversial Defense Department's program of Total Information Awareness (TIA) -- which developed technologies of mining personal data of people in the United States -- was marked unconstitutional by lawmakers and defunded by Congress in 2003. TIA was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, in January 2002.

The conservative New York Times columnist William Safire had blasted TIA with these words:

"If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every website you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend -- all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a 'virtual, centralized grand database'. To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you -- passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the FBI, your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance -- and you have the supersnoop's dream: a 'Total Information Awareness' about every U.S. citizen. This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks"...

Whew! Pretty scary stuff. Public criticism followed so Congress halted the TIA.

Total Information Awareness; the masterminds behind The Thing: Retired American Admiral: Mr. John Poindexter (President Reagan's national security advisor) and Grinning Jew Fellow: Mr. Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Defense Secretary to George W Bush)

Controversial... Unconstitutional... Defunded... Nosy... Snoopy... Orwellian...

You think Bushs have stop the program?

Program was just moved from the Pentagon to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

The NSA came at the center of a political firestorm over President Bush's program to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States. A $19 million contract to build the prototype system was awarded in late 2002 to Hicks & Associates, a consulting firm in Arlington, Va., that is run by former Defense and military officials... Tom Armour, the Genoa II program manager, declined to comment for the story. But, he said that ARDA -- which absorbed the TIA programs -- has pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic...

ARDA now is undergoing some changes of its own. The outfit is being taken out of the NSA, placed under the control of Negroponte's office, and given a new name. It will be called the Disruptive Technology Office.

We're supposed to trust that Bushs have the best interests of the American people at heart.  But, can you trust a program that was several times discontinued through a legislative act?

If you don't like TIA, you may like MATRIX (Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information eXchange), the latest data mining program to emerge from the government. It is still stirring a controversy... so, don't be afraid, it's here. Be ready!