"The Resurrection of Total Information Awareness"

Kirt Nimmo

Remember when we were told that the TIA (Terrorism Information Awareness) program was terminated? The Senate supposedly cut funding for the program last September, according to the Congressional Record. This followed the ditching of retired Adm. John Poindexter, Iran-Contra criminal and mastermind behind TIA, due to his "terrorism futures" idea, or Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP). It was just too "unorthodox" for the folks in Congress.

Here's the bill supposedly eliminating TIA. Note the caveats. I recall thinking at the time: intelligence agencies simply don't get rid of ideas like TIA, especially after money and work has been poured into them. Instead, they transfer the research and money elsewhere and continue to develop the programs.In essence, this is what happened to TIA. "Congress eliminated a Pentagon office that had been developing this terrorist-tracking technology because of fears it might ensnare innocent Americans. Still, 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."

"The whole congressional action looks like a shell game," said Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. "There may be enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical work is continuing."

"Congressional officials would not say which Poindexter programs were killed and which were transferred. People with direct knowledge of the contracts told the AP that the surviving programs included some of 18 data-mining projects known in Poindexter's research as Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery."

In addition to Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery, Poindexter's group was working on other numerous data-mining programs, including Genoa II, Babylon, Communicator, Genisys, HumanID, Bio-Surveillance, TIDES, EARS and WAE.

These TIA programs were specifically designed to allow snoops to tap into private data. Here's a cluster chart showing how Poindexter figured it would work.

As James Bovard pointed out in an article on David Frum and Richard Perle's book (The End of Evil: How to Win the War on Terror), TIA and other snoop programs are simply too valuable to give up, privacy considerations be damned. Bovard writes:

Frum and Perle champion another surveillance monstrosity at least partially thwarted by Congress -- a Total Information Awareness-type system to allow the government to compile dossiers on "an individual's credit history, his recent movements, his immigration status and personal background, his age and sex, and a hundred other pieces of information." Frum and Perle insist that the government can be trusted with such data because procedures could be developed to link the data to a specific name only if "probable cause" of criminal conduct exists. In other words, regardless of the vast temptation for political and bureaucratic abuse of such data, the authors blithely assume that government officials -- at least in the future -- will be angels.

Frum and Perle also call for a National ID card, including "biometric data, like fingerprints or retinal scans or DNA." Again, they shrug off any concerns about how such a system could be used to sabotage people's lives and privacy, asserting, "The victims of executive branch abuse will be able to sue the wrongdoers and collect damages; the victims of a mass terrorist attack will have no such recourse." This would be hilarious except for the possibility that people who watch Fox News might actually believe such a remedy exists.

In other words, the neocons and their friends in the Senate, House, and especially the Pentagon have no intention of getting rid of TIA-like programs.

You will be snooped.

And if you think the government will limit the massive amount of collected data to terrorism, recall the abuses of COINTELPRO.

"The mandate of [COINTELPRO] was spelled out in one of the stacks of secret documents released by Senate investigators in 1976: to 'disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize' groups and individuals the FBI considered politically objectionable. Those targeted in nearly all cases were not foreign spies, terrorists or individuals suspected of criminal acts," notes Earl Ofari Hutchinson.

Deja vu, anyone?