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Funding for TIA All But Dead
Shackleford writes "Wired has an article saying that the Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would troll Americans' personal records to find terrorists before they strike, may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies: death by legislation. The Senate's $368 billion version of the 2004 defense appropriations bill, released from committee to the full Senate on Wednesday, contains a provision that would deny all funds to, and thus would effectively kill, the Terrorism Information Awareness program, formerly known as Total Information Awareness. TIA's projected budget for 2004 is $169 million."
An Executive Summary of TIA released by DARPA is available here. An explanation and overview of TIA, again by DARPA, can be found here.
Unique signatures are rare.
Come on, now, how hard is most of the information that was supposed to be mined for TIA that hard to get anyway?? For $35US you can look in the yellow pages (or, of course, log into a web site), punch in some data, and get a background check of anyone anyway. This includes
...and so on. Corporations wanting to know everything about employees have already created the tools to mine our personal information anyway...do you really thing the gov't can't?
1. Credit statements
2. Job histories
3. Criminal records.
4. Tax records.
Just because the funding is gone, do you really thing the gov't has given up on this? Bad press killed this "initiative" long before this Congress did...but don't worry, they have wizened up. Next time they just won't mention to us that they are doing it...
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
who really thinks that the DoD/CIA/NSA/FBI couldnt come up with the money
That's just it. For the most part, they can't do things like this because spending is allocated by Congress. Money isn't just thrown out as "400$ million for FBI" and that's it. The expenditures are broken down, and aside from some DoD/Military spending, mostly public. Note that Congress still maintains oversight of this spending, it is just not public, for security reasons. This is how many leaks about the F-117 and B-2 projects came out; through Congressional offices that had oversight on the project.
The Federal Budget is a law passed by Congress every year. Agencies cannot just reallocate the money as they see fit. This "Power of the Purse" is probably the greatest power that the Congress currently has. It has used this power to enact a national drinking age, by witholding highway funds to states that don't comply. I believe it was also used recently against states with medicinal marijuana laws, but could not find an article confirming this.
The people suggesting that this program will just "reappear" are misguided, not "insightful". No agency would attempt to piss off Congress like that. The TIA is dead for FY2004, assuming the bill passes unmodified. Whether it stays dead will remain to be seen.
They already renamed it once from Total Information Awareness to Terrorism Information Awareness:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/
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Oh, and to trump your little anecdote, I'll bring up the Cuban coast guardsmen who piloted their ship directly into a resort at Key West. The men were armed, as was the ship. They docked and walked around (armed) trying to find someone to defect to. Here's a link in case you've forgotten.
Let's not forget that Democratic presidential candidate Bob Graham was the primary author of the PATRIOT Act. He wrote the intelligence sections of it, the kind that deal with information sharing between government agencies and such.
If we're going to blame politicians, don't forget those crazy Democrats. Oh, I forgot - it's only en vogue to criticize Bush.
That's just it. For the most part, they can't do things like this because spending is allocated by Congress.
What do you think was going on during Iran-Contra? After congress outlawed the funding of US backed terrorism, the CIA continued thier operations using money from serveral sources, including private donations and selling cocaine
No agency would attempt to piss off Congress like that.
See the same links in reference to this statement.
Read, L
Yah. True. And if you read The Tower Report on Iran Contra, you'd know that it was the IBM mainframe that caught them out in the end, not investigative journalists.
Basically they were hoisted by their own petard (but apparently not dropped hard enough afterwards). They had an early email system that (wow!) kept backups of everything, including things that they'd thought they'd deleted. So what was so incriminating? The email discussion between JP and other White House Staff concerning how various lies might go over with the public regarding the Iran Contra scandal as it unfolded -- how the story might be changed, how they might spin various half- truths.
The devil is in the details: you can't read the Tower Report without reading the footnotes, because this is where the real story is: how they were undone by their own words, when they thought everything they wrote could be deleted and or otherwise kept secret.
TIA profiling comes a little bit too close to Minority Report's FutureCrime and 1984's ThoughtCrime for comfort.