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

I'm not an American...

[MaestroSartori]

...and I don't think I'm hugely paranoid about evil government and so on, but I suspect most of the things that TIA was going to do are probably already going on in one form or another behind the scenes.

Maybe the only good thing about formalising it would be that at least there'd be some sort of accountability...

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"

Whatever...

[goldenfield]

So its 'officially' cancelled...I have a hard time believe that the government thought it was important/useful, and now everyone has agreed that we don't need it, and has moved on.

So now there's no offical TIA project...that just means they can hide bits and pieces of it in other projects.

If they want the data, they'll get it.

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.