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Total
Information Awareness is Back
Resurgence of
the mother of all surveillance programs
Infowars.net | March 8, 2007
By Steve Watson
The Pentagon's super snoop "Total Information
Awareness" program is back in business, just as
we predicted it would be.
Congress attempted to kill
the ill-conceived
DARPA program in 2003.
But instead, the program, designed to somehow
find terrorists from documenting everyone's
credit card bills, car rental receipts and
travel records, went underground and has now
returned, bigger and stronger and worse than
ever.
The
Washington Times is
reporting:
Homeland
Security officials are testing a supersnoop
computer system that sifts through personal
information on U.S. citizens to detect
possible terrorist attacks, prompting
concerns from lawmakers who have called for
investigations.
The
system uses the same data-mining process
that was developed by the Pentagon's Total
Information Awareness (TIA) project that was
banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast
privacy violations.
In an
Infowars.net article
on domestic surveillance from December 2005, I
wrote:
Shortly after the
announcement of TIA, the Pentagon backtracked
and told us that TIA was shutting down, but the
tools are there waiting to be used, They'll just
rename it and start it up again at any given
time. The Tools of TIA include "LifeLog"
which is described as "a multimedia, digital
record of everywhere you go and everything you
see, hear, read, say and touch". Another tool is
the
MATRIX database, A
federally funded crime database run by multiple
states at once.
The AP
had reported this in September 2003, in an
article entitled
Pentagon office creating surveillance system to
close, stating "But
they left open the possibility that some or all
of the high-powered software tools under
development might be used by different
government offices to gather foreign
intelligence from foreigners, U.S. citizens
abroad or foreigners in the United States." So
it was not hard to predict the return of the all
seeing all knowing surveillance agenda program.
It has been
revealed that a project called ADVISE --
Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight
and Semantic Enhancement -- was initiated in
2003 following the demise of the TIA project.
Data mined by ADVISE can include credit-card
purchases, telephone or Internet details,
medical records, travel and banking information.
A Government
Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the
project was requested by Rep. David R. Obey,
Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House
Appropriations Committee.
This is
the latest in a number of examples that
indicated that TIA never really went away. In
2004 it was reported that TIA was alive and well
in Arlington County.
Capitol Hill Blue
reported:
Despite
Congressional action cutting funding, and
the resignation of the program’s
controversial director, retired admiral John
Poindexter, DARPA’s TIA program is alive and
well and prying into the personal business
of Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a
week.
“When
Congress cut the funding, the Pentagon -
with administration approval - simply moved
the program into a ‘black bag’ account,”
says a security consultant who worked on the
DARPA project. “Black bag programs don’t
require Congressional approval and are
exempt from traditional oversight.”
DARPA
also hired private contractors to fill many
of the roles in the program, which helped
evade detection by Congressional auditors.
Using a private security firm like Cantwell,
instead of the Federal Protective Service,
helped keep TIA off the radar screen.
DARPA
moved into the Arlington County building
shortly after the September 11, 2001,
attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon and established the TIA project
under the USA Patriot Act and a number of
executive orders from President George W.
Bush.
In 2006 the
National Journal revealed
that the NSA’s Advanced
Research and Development Activity took over TIA
and carried on the experimental network in late
2003. ARDA continued vetting new tools and even
kept the aggressive experiment schedule.
The National Journal reported that the program
is now accessed by, among others: the NSA, the
CIA, DIA, CENTCOM, the National Counterterorrism
Center, the Guantanamo prison, and Special
Operations Command (SOCOM).
Big Brother is
most definitely still watching. Enjoy watching
your tax dollars at work watching you.
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