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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."
I'm sleeping easier now.
Consensual sex is boring.
Denying funding does not mean there is no money for a project. It simply means that the project will use hidden funding. The U.S. government has established that it does not need to tell its citizens how the citizen's money is spent.
Think about it: he's got a threat out there with a demonstrated ability to perform mass killings, and he'd prefer not to die in a fireball of aviation fuel. Neither would his boss, his boss' replacement, nor any of his immediate colleagues.
Meanwhile, his former colleagues are hounding him because he still doesn't really have a good answer on who mailed the anthrax.
If I ever saw a man grasping for straws, Ashcroft's that man. I think I understand where he's been coming from in all this (ever been hounded by QA and PHBs?), and I feel for him.
Even so, I'm glad TIA is dead.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
<sarcasm>What a shame. I was looking forward to having an identity chip embedded into my skin to act as my credit card, driver's license, official government identity, travel pass, etc.</sarcasm>
The more I watch "The Running Man" the more I realize how close we are to living in that kind of society.
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither!"
I'm not really sure how the entire process works, but I wont really feel confident that TIA is dead until it is officially killed, as opposed to simply not funded.
There is no dark side of the moon really, matter of fact it's all dark
... has been put off for a little while. But it will come. Sorry, guys, but that's just the nature of information tech. The gov't is not needed for this.
Once info is collected, it can be collected, archived, sold under the table or social-engineered out of you or your bank's representative.
Then, it is simple a matter of storage. Even now, the credit records of all consumers in the United States can be fit onto a single hard disk (assume a 200mb disk, 200 million consumers, and 1000 bytes per record).
Not much can be done about that, except a Butlerian Jihad.
Interesting that "Funding for TIA All But Dead" is the tag on a $169 MILLION budget. Really, I'd say that $400 was the long shot, and the $169 was the "awww shucks, i guess we'll be real thrifty and carefull with this new project and only spend $170 Million". The TIA project is sadly offensive in a USA where the whole shebang is getting budgeted on BORROWED money. Either people have to sit up and decide to pay their taxes for this jibberish or they need to ease up on the Orwellian Nightmare Funding Project... aka TIA.
Maybe they can put this TIA thing back a year and do something about the crumbling inner-city-Detroit, or poor without food/healthcare, or some-other-more-worthy-project.
Really, even with that said, who really thinks that the DoD/CIA/NSA/FBI couldnt come up with the money (even in *addition* to what they spend now) to fund such a project. Dont think just because they are *reporting* to be less serious about it; "hey look - were cutting its funding - its not a priority (since you were so offended..)", this Stasi-Like crap is only gonna get more severe as your country slips into a deeper self-induced paranoia/schitzophrenia... and Bush is driving the bus.
The great thing about Congress is when they "understand" the issues in our favor. I'm so very glad they and their staffs are doing their homework.
-0.5, Shades of Troll
Like the Patriot Act, Leave No Child Behind and Clear Skies initiatives, the best way of figuring out what a Bush effort is NOT about is to pay attention to the name. The "Terrorism" component is an attempt to bludgeon critics of this sick effort. It would do nothing to prevent terrorism. That was never the point. Bush doesn't care that we're less safe then we were. If he did, he'd fund security for our ports, nuclear facilities, water processing plants, etc. But that would interfere with tax cuts, tax cuts and ...oh, yeah, almost forgot, tax cuts.
Actually, my poorly worded point is that sometimes people are simply wrong. Even the French did not say there were no WMD in Iraq. There were various opinions about what Iraq probably had. Most evidence was to the effect of, "they had such and such chemicals, but can't account for what happended to them." Saying now that there are no WMD in Iraq does not automatically mean that the US and Britian lied about it. To impeach a president, you need to present proof that he lied about the evidence. I'm all for the Democrats investigating the issue. I just get annoyed with people condemning the president without any proof.
Vote for Pedro
There is absolutely no evidence that Bush knowingly told a lie about weapons of mass destruction. He used information from the same source that Bill Clinton used when he launched a strike on Iraq and Sudan in the late 90's!
If we're going to nail Bush to the cross, we might as well place Clinton to his right - he ordered a strike on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan! Can you believe it, a place that makes medicine to save people was bombed at Clinton's behest? But Clinton also had faulty intelligence.
We need to strengthen our foreign intelligence capabilities in a meaningful way. The problem is not in the White House, and it's not political, but much worse at its root.
Steps to funding Black Ops
1. Start Super-Classified Government Project
2. ????
3. Profit!
4. Fund Super-Classified Government Project with step 3
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
For all those who decry the inefficiency and redundancy in government, with many, many eyes looking over the same piece of paper, you've just seen WHY it's a good thing.
All hail redundant legislative bodies, wherever they may lie!
Bill Clinton used faulty intelligence, in the same way GWB used faulty intelligence. These documents were not forged by Americans (as far as we can tell), and the Brits refuse to tell where they got it from (even to the Americans), except to say it came from a third party country.