BASTARD CHILDREN OF “TIA”

Congress sup­pos­edly killed Total Information Awareness, Darpa’s far-​​flung effort to comb data­bases in search of ter­ror­ists. But that doesn’t mean the author­i­ties are fin­ished sort­ing through the records of Americans to expose evil­do­ers. Many ana­lysts think bits of TIA still exist on the covert, “black” side of the Pentagon’s ledger. This month’s Wired mag­a­zine has my run­down of the unclas­si­fied efforts, with straight out of gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate doc­u­ments.
THERE’S MORE: Former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt signed his state up to the noto­ri­ous MATRIX (Multistate Anti-​​Terrorism Information Exchange) data min­ing effort, accord­ing to the Deseret News. That’s the TIA-​​esque project run by for­mer drug smug­glers for eight state gov­ern­ments.
AND MORE: According to the Deseret News, Utah’s cur­rent gov­er­nor, Olene Walker, “has pulled the plug on the state’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the con­tro­ver­sial MATRIX data­base at least until a joint gov­er­nor– leg­isla­tive over­sight com­mit­tee can hold pub­lic hear­ings about the pro­gram that col­lects com­pre­hen­sive dossiers on every res­i­dent.“
AND MORE: Nice! Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue “ordered the GBI [Georgia Bureau of Investigation] on Friday to sever all ties with the con­tro­ver­sial Matrix crime-​​fighting data­base,” the Atlanta Journal-​​Constitution reports.
This is the sec­ond time Perdue has made such a dec­la­ra­tion. After the first one, the Georgia author­i­ties con­tin­ued to “pump infor­ma­tion into the data­base,” the Associated Press notes.
AND MORE: Despite all this, many state gov­ern­ments are still show­ing an inter­est in jack­ing into MATRIX, accord­ing to the AP:

Mark Zadra, chief inves­ti­ga­tor for Florida state police, which runs the Matrix project, said orga­niz­ers have given pre­sen­ta­tions to more than 10 Northeastern and Midwestern states in recent weeks, argu­ing at each stop that the data­base is an invalu­able law enforce­ment tool.
Officials in Iowa and North Carolina said Friday that they are explor­ing the sys­tem. And doc­u­ments obtained through a public-​​records request in Florida indi­cate Arizona and Arkansas also may have inter­est in the quick-​​access infor­ma­tion repos­i­tory, which com­bines state records with 20 bil­lion pieces of data held by a pri­vate company. 

February 1st, 2004 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.