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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 $169 million."
An Executive Summary of TIA released by DARPA is available here. An explanation and overview of TIA, again by DARPA, can be found here.
Unique signatures are rare.
who really thinks that the DoD/CIA/NSA/FBI couldnt come up with the money
That's just it. For the most part, they can't do things like this because spending is allocated by Congress. Money isn't just thrown out as "400$ 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.