BLACK “TIA”-LIKE RESEARCH REVEALED

We’ve been say­ing for months not to get too happy over the sup­posed “death” of Total Information Awareness. Now, Defense Tech Pal Mike Sniffen reports that when Congress moved to defund TIA, it “qui­etly agreed to con­tinue pay­ing to develop highly spe­cial­ized soft­ware to gather for­eign intel­li­gence on ter­ror­ists.”

In a clas­si­fied sec­tion sum­ma­rized pub­licly, Congress added money for this soft­ware research to the “National Foreign Intelligence Program,” with­out iden­ti­fy­ing openly which intel­li­gence agency would do the work.
It said, for the time being, prod­ucts of this research could only be used over­seas or against non-U.S. cit­i­zens in this coun­try, not against Americans on U.S. soil.
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. 

THERE’S MORE: Phil Carter has a nice analy­sis of the risks of TIA-​​like efforts.

February 22nd, 2004 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.