TIA Project to End

Marnhinn writes "MSNBC is reporting that the Terrorism Spying Project (also known as TIA) is dead. The government is cancelling most of the project and changing the rest to focus on people outside the United States." TIA had been on death's door for a while, but now it's finally official. Some of the programs will still be around, however, they will just be shifted over to different departments.

Comments

Re:I'm not an American...

[msgmonkey]

Well one interesting legal point someone mentioned a while back was whilst most countries constitutions do not allow spying on their citizens there is nothing stopping them from spying on other counties citizens. A legal loophole would allow lets say the US and UK to have an agreement whereby they say "you spy on mine and I'ill spy on yours and we'ill exchange the information"

Score one for the good guys?

[Millennium]

I don't know about this. If it were truly scrapped, then it would be a wonderful thing. More likely, however, it's simply being driven underground.

Once granted power, no government ever gives it up willingly. That's the whole point of limited government, and it's why I doubt that this is really being cancelled. I'd watch the budget for next year, to see if the infamous black budget suddently grows by the same amount that TIA would have gotten.

State Versions

[borroff]

The article neglects to mention that some states have begun implementing their own version of TIA (see The Washington Post article). There appears to be some feeling that they can sneak in under the radar if it's not a federal program.

The pledges of restraint by Florida law enforcement officials are particularly comforting.

Why, yes, it IS an aluminum foil hat.

[rot26]

Anybody who thinks for a minute that TIA is going away as long as Ashcroft is AG is high. This isn't a retreat, it's a regrouping before the next attack. As has been discussed here before, we will see this thing pop up again, medusa-like, under a variety of disguises; they'll be tracking child molesters, deadbeat dads, drug dealers, rapists, what have you, and each will be a noble enterprise, as difficult to criticize as a newborn baby. (No mention of rogue librarians will be made, for sure.) Behind the scenes, of course, will be the massive data-mining that was the original goal. We'll only hear about THAT part incidentally, incrementally, accidentally, etc-ally.

The 52 most dangerous American officials

[axxackall]

I found a very interesting article about some French people thinking that 9/11 was organized by US official in order to achive specific personal political and financial benefits. Here is the text of the article in case if it will be slashdotted:

PARIS, Sept. 25 -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is the Ace of Spades and al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden a Joker in a provocative pack of French playing cards depicting "the 52 most dangerous American officials."

A RIPOSTE TO the "most-wanted" cards of Iraqi leaders issued to U.S. soldiers, the deck is the latest commercial offering by a radical think tank whose conspiracy theory account of the Sept. 11 attacks stormed French bestseller charts last year.

"We've already sold some 2,500 decks. That's not bad considering we couldn't find anyone who was willing to print them at first," said Thierry Meyssan, president of the Paris-based Reseau Voltaire group.

"We were shocked by the indecency of the cards distributed by the U.S. military. It was as if arresting people was some kind of game," Meyssan told Reuters Thursday.

Two hundred packs of the original Pentagon-devised U.S. cards were sent to U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The American public has since snapped up hundreds of thousands of the decks, which portray Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as the Ace of Spades.

The French cards bestow that honor not on President Bush but Rumsfeld. Under his mug shot, he is accused of using the Sept. 11 attacks "to increase military budgets and plan an army in space that could completely dominate Earth."

As King of Diamonds -- the suit chosen to represent economic power in the U.S. administration -- Bush is described merely as "head of a baseball club ... designated president of the United States by friends of his father at the Supreme Court."

In the 2000 election, the Court stopped a potentially decisive recount in Florida, a move that handed the presidency to Bush.

Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida network Washington blames for the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. landmarks, is a Joker described as "a CIA agent charged ... with provoking a clash between the 'Arab-Muslim' and 'Judeo-Christian' worlds."

Meyssan won notoriety for his book "L'Effroyable Imposture" ("The Appalling Fraud"), which suggested U.S. military insiders were probably behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

I am now looking to buy that french deck of cards - cood be a very insightful gift here in North America (especially here in Canada) for people who has not completely lost the sense of humor :)

Re:The 52 most dangerous American officials

[KludgeGrrl]

I am now looking to buy that french deck of cards

Why give the French all the credit? A US blogger came up with the same idea back in April

Indeed, as a Canadian, you might have heard the spot on CBC's "Here and Now" a few months ago where a maker of such a deck was banned from selling it on e-bay. According to The Agonist, "He owns the domain name, "thebushadministration.com" where he's posted the images for sale."

So you can spend locally and protest globally. Or something like that.

Re:Whatever...

[EinarH]

TIA will become another program that's "downgraded" in other words like the Star Wars program grom the Reagan era.
Star Wars was supposed to end, but lived on in black budget for many years, hiding in the dark and with only small leaks of information leaked out in the ninthies, and then almost 15 years later the program derived into the Ballistic Missile Defense program.

So the program in it's current form is dead, but the research necessarily to complete the program for future use will continue.