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Total Information Awareness, Disguised And Alive
unassimilatible writes "According to the AP, aspects of the controversial Total Information Awareness DARPA program, officially shut down by the U.S. Congress in September 2003 after a public outcry, seem to have survived. The article reports, 'Some projects from retired Adm. John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness effort were transferred to U.S. intelligence offices, congressional, federal and research officials told The Associated Press. In addition, Congress left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA, that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter's program.'"
ARDA's mission is to sponsor high-risk high-payoff research designed to leverage leading edge technology in the solution of some of the most critical poblems facing the intelligence community (IC).
High Risk as in 'Public Backlash'?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
am I not even remotely surprised by this announcement ?
Could anyone actually trust a government that passed the PATRIOT Act to actually can TIA ?
We tell them no, then they break it in to a bunch of pieces and do it anyway.
Why do we keep electing these people who keep misrepresenting us to represent us?
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
I don't think treating americans diffrently based on where they are in the world is a good precident to set....
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
Many government agencies have been struggling to pay catch up when it comes to the "Information Revolution". Now a decade after the revolution began some are starting to realize the potential. It's been pretty embarassing to sit at your desk in the CIA and not be able to do a Google Search. I believe that the "total information awareness" program is simply a way to try and rectify this.
The tools are only going to get better, and the more laws and policies that allow the "leakage" of personal information will only make "privacy" a state of mind as opposed to something you actually have. If congress was so concerned about privacy perhaps they would rethink the Patriot Act, or other invasive police policies that have been en vogue for the last decade.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Both sides read the founding documents the way they want. Dem's are all about freedom of speech until it comes to something like campaign finance reform, which is a blatant violation of freedom of speech. They crap on our right to bear arms. Neutering it every chance they get. The republicans are giving the finger to our rights to privacy with all this patriot act and other such bullshit. Denying US citizens the right to legal representation and a fair trial by classifying them as POW's (or whatever they are calling them this week). There are so many more examples on both sides. The government is seriously getting out of hand. It has grown into something it was never intended to be. Things went wrong when power was taken away from the states and sent to D.C.
Yes it does. The exec branch made the decision to detain an US citizens and ignored their oaths. What makes you think they will do what they should in regards to the USA PATRIOT act?
... when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." Congress
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July 1, 2002
Citizen Padilla: Dangerous Precedents
by Robert A. Levy
Robert A. Levy is senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.
Jose Padilla, a.k.a. Abdullah al-Muhajir, supposedly plotted to build and detonate a radiological "dirty bomb." He is a U.S. citizen. Yet he's being detained by the military -- indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn't been charged with any crime. Yaser Esam Hamdi is also a U.S. citizen. He, too, is being detained by the military -- indefinitely, without seeing an attorney, even though he hasn't been charged with any crime. Meanwhile, Zacarias Moussaoui, purportedly the 20th hijacker, is not a U.S. citizen. Neither is Richard Reid, the alleged shoe bomber. Both have attorneys. Both have been charged before federal civilian courts.
What gives? Four men: two citizens and two non-citizens. Is it possible that constitutional rights -- like habeas corpus, which requires the government to justify continued detentions, and the Sixth Amendment, which assures a speedy and public jury trial with assistance of counsel -- can be denied to citizens yet extended to non-citizens? That's what the Bush administration would have us believe. Citizen Padilla's treatment is perfectly legitimate, insists Attorney General John Ashcroft, because Padilla is an "enemy combatant" and there is "clear Supreme Court precedent" to handle those persons differently, even if they are citizens.
Ashcroft's so-called clear precedent is a 1942 Supreme Court case, Ex Parte Quirin, which dealt with Nazi saboteurs, at least one of whom was a U.S. citizen. "Enemy combatants," said the Court, are either lawful -- for example, the regular army of a belligerent country -- or unlawful -- for example, terrorists. When lawful combatants are captured, they are POWs. As POWs, they cannot be tried (except for war crimes), they must be repatriated after hostilities are over, and they only have to provide their name, rank, and serial number if interrogated. Clearly, that's not what the Justice Department has in mind for Padilla.
Unlawful combatants are different. When unlawful combatants are captured, they can be tried by a military tribunal. That's what happened to the Nazi saboteurs in Quirin. But Padilla has not been charged much less tried. Indeed, the president's executive order of November 2001 excludes U.S. citizens from the purview of military tribunals. If the president were to modify his order, the Quirin decision might provide legal authority for the military to try Padilla. But the decision provides no legal authority for detaining a citizen without an attorney solely for purposes of aggressive interrogation.
Moreover, the Constitution does not distinguish between the protections extended to ordinary citizens on one hand and unlawful-combatant citizens on the other. Nor does the Constitution distinguish between the crimes covered by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments and the terrorist acts Padilla is suspected of planning. Still, the Quirin Court justified those distinctions -- noting that Congress had formally declared war and thereby invoked articles of war that expressly authorized the trial of unlawful combatants by military tribunal. Today, the situation is very different. We've had virtually no input from Congress: no declaration of war, no authorization of tribunals, and no suspension of habeas corpus.
Yet those functions are explicitly assigned to Congress by Article I of the Constitution. It is Congress, not the executive branch, which has the power "To declare War" and "To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court." Only Congress can suspend the "Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus
The government isn't really spying on you, per se.
Of course not.
They are taking all the public information out there, and data mining it to potentially flag and catch criminals and terrorists.
And it won't flag and catch me by mistake. They'd never make an error like that. This technology only affects bad guys.
This actually should be wonderful news for me. I made $92 off of Poindexter's stupid Total Information Awareness program last year by selling this T-shirt protesting it: "I gave up my essential liberties to obtain a little temporary security, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!" [Disclaimer: I might make money off you if you click that link and buy one, but I have a job, honestly don't need your money, would forward it to no worthy cause, and am just showing off my shirt design and bragging about the fact that I made $92 off of Total Information Awareness.]
The crowd here turn into luddites as soon as technology is used by the government, but I think this is a great use for it. The 9/11 hijackers were in plain view, but because of the different agencies and bureaucracies, they fell through. This could be a tool to find the next 9/11 and I am all for it.
Well, let's not get too presumptive about 9/11. It hasn't been demonstrated at all that the only way to prevent this attack would have been to implement a massively connected database with an extensive electronic dossier on each one of us. In fact, it hasn't been demonstrated at all that the attack could not have been prevented simply by people doing their jobs like they were supposed to.
Once the 9/11 commission finishes its report, maybe we will see what improvements can be made short of creating an unAmerican police state.
I disagree. I challenge you to name one area of our lives that is entirely outside of government control. I can't think of any.