The ultimate data bases

You may recall several years ago when John Poindexter (yes, that John Poindexter) was appointed to head up a Pentagon program called TIA (Total Information Intelligence) to collect huge volumes of data on every American in order to use "data mining" techniques to identify people the government didn't like (referred to by the government as "terrorists").

When news of that program got out, Congress closed it down (or thought it did), and Poindexter went on to other projects.

Now, Raw Story reports that the program was not closed at all, just moved to other agencies and re-named to hide it from Congress and the public.

A controversial intelligence data mining program, which was closed by lawmakers over privacy concerns two years ago, has continued to receive funding and remained in operation under different code names in different agencies, according to today's National Journal.

Excerpts from the Journal's article follow:

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

…

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA. ...

Once more, the administration ignores Congress and does whatever it pleases even when Congress has said, "no."