The Total Information Awareness program was never abandoned

WHEN RETIRED Adm. John Poindexter left government service last year, it was widely believed that his misguided scheme to collect private data on U. S. citizens was gone for good, too.

It was a bad assumption. The Poindexter-inspired drive to electronically surveil and compile dossiers on millions of Americans is apparently still in gear.

(snip)

Known as Total Information Awareness, the Pentagon project was engineered by Poindexter, President Reagan's national security adviser, who was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress and more in the Iran-Contra scandal. Poindexter resurfaced in the Bush White House, but was dismissed again in August after public outrage over his terrorist futures marketing idea.

Total Information Awareness endeavored to screen out terrorist acts by cataloging individuals' traits: securing their travel plans, arrest records, passport applications, work permits, driver's licenses, credit-card purchases, choice of books, medical records or anything else.

The implications of the government compiling such vast dossiers on Americans -- with great potential for abuse -- were harrowing. So, again spurred by public uproar, Congress shut it down -- or so we thought.

It was an illusion. The work persists, only now Congress farms it out to various government agencies.

It's time for further congressional action to shut down this data-mining idea once and for all.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/02/27/E

Secret Total Information Awareness

http://www.thememoryhole.org/policestate/iao-logo.htm

Contains the original logo.....
Information Awareness Office Website
Deletes Its Logo

The disappeared logo

USPS stops that home delivery stuff and only delivers to PO boxes at the outside edge of the neighborhoods. Hope they will no longer get "holiday"
TIPS :dilemma:

Seems like he was all shits-n-giggles that they had targeted voters by mining their data.

Could their be a link between this and the alleged Republican success?

We can just google it up !

Data-mining schemes
Friday, February 27, 2004

can you search the Chronicle site? any long sentence from the OP works

Loved this :

""Total Information Awareness endeavored to screen out terrorist acts by cataloging individuals' traits: securing their travel plans, arrest records, passport applications, work permits, driver's licenses, credit-card purchases, choice of books, medical records or anything else.

The implications of the government compiling such vast dossiers on Americans -- with great potential for abuse -- were harrowing. So, again spurred by public uproar, Congress shut it down -- or so we thought.

It was an illusion. The work persists, only now Congress farms it out to various government agencies.

It's time for further congressional action to shut down this data-mining idea once and for all.""

I don't mind them going after this information, but as you can see from who've they given the datamining jobs to (ChoicePoint , the company Greg Palast reveals was behind the FL vote purge of blacks and had a similar scheme in Latin America exposed) they already got caught with loose-ness in handling the data securely, with bank customers being warned their identities were at risk of being stolen.

If the Government ITSELF was in charge of this and assured the security on US soil, this TIA project might have flown. Now it's been privatized and the data is spread to the wind to the four corners of the world. Anyone in India, at the many real estate loan processing 'back offices' where loan files are readily accessable, can see US citizen's full financial histories complete with SS#s, credit card #s and, well, you get the picture. It's all there. They SAY it's protected but it really isn't:

""...Alan Paller, director of research at the Bethesda, Md.-based SANS Institute, said the California law is probably necessary because of the kinds of crime that are occurring. A group in Russia and Ukraine has been acquiring customer data, extorting money to prevent its release and then selling it anyway. Paller believes some companies are paying off the extortionists in an attempt to contain the damage.""

California leads way on ID theft legislation
http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2002/0,4814,76721,00.html

So it looks like if the private firms can't secure the data, the federal government ought to step in. If Total Information Awareness is going to go on, it's better to do it at home and put safeguards in place. Otherwise this is just an accident waiting to happen.

It's a gold sealed invitation to tremendous abuse without any way to protect oneself.

Total Information Awareness offshored to the Bahamas via Ben Bell III's company
http://www.zmetro.com/archives/000901.php

""It began as one of the Bush administration's most ambitious homeland security efforts, a passenger screening program designed to use commercial records, terrorist watch lists and computer software to assess millions of travelers and target those who might pose a threat. The system has cost almost $100 million. But it has not been turned on because it sparked protests from lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, who said it intruded too deeply into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Bush administration put off testing until after the election.

Now the choreographer of that program, a former intelligence official named Ben H. Bell III, is taking his ideas to a private company offshore, where he and his colleagues plan to use some of the same concepts, technology and contractors to assess people for risk, outside the reach of U.S. regulators, according to documents and interviews.

Bell's new employer, the Bahamas-based Global Information Group Ltd., intends to amass large databases of international records and analyze them in the coming years for corporations, government agencies and other information services. One of the first customers is information giant LexisNexis Group, one of the main contractors on the government system that was known until recently as the second generation of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening Program, or CAPPS II. The program is now known as Secure Flight.""

So, along with the ChoicePoint's of the world, the information is vacuumed up and sieved through this offshore company where our NSA boys can either remotely access or go visit on company working-vacations. Your tax dollars at work. They can even lose your information, after all it isn't really YOUR information anyways the corporations all OWN YOU now. Get with the program, we're all slaves to the new paradigm.

If you want to crack down on liberals just make sure they can't fly, can't use their credit cards--which are maxxed out due to the negative savings rate, outsource their jobs to India and China, and just to add insult to injury, hire only conservatives to populate the "new" NSA, FBI, CIA, etc. etc.
(see Kingdom Come, p. 52 Aug 4, 1997 Time Magazine, Mormon hiring recruitment program at CIA, FBI).

Makes you wonder when the liberal hiring program will ever begin...

Would you mind posting this information in General? If not, I'm happy to.

us essentially. How else does one look at it?

n/t

with the 4th amendment and all, the corporations that require we "gift" them our information, which they then treat as their own, their "property", and then do as they please with, violates their fiduciary responsibilities to the public commonweal.

If profiling or even searching for specific information, as long as the duly constituted authorities using legal access and with proper warrant procedures (yes, even the current law's legal 72 hour delay) can be done in order to prevent terror attacks, then this Total Information Awareness process assumes we are all collectively guilty and sieves through everything they have collected on us:

This is close to ex post facto law and Nulla poena sine lege- "the principle that no-one may be punished for an act which is not against the law"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto

They know there are perps out there, let's turn society upside down and shake the bad guys out the easy way ! Put another way, let's arrest everybody since we know some are guilty.

Enter martial law...

My problem is the state(any state) spying, period. But I know that's the world we live in(CIA, MI6, whatever), so I know nothing will actually get fixed. We'll write some laws, and then another administration will break them. Write some more laws, then another administration will break those as well. Once you start from a foundation of creating spy agencies, it will obviously lead to domestic spying. It has to, that's how power works.

DARPA won't go away. Programs like TIA won't go away. Poindexter will live forever.

Which is why I find all the outrage pointless. They have spied, are spying, and will spy. They got caught this time(after years of doing it, and having the story shelved for a year. Mmmmm, media), and they'll just dream up some new technology that will make it tougher to catch next time(what else do they do at DARPA?). There will be a next time, there always is.

Civilization requires order.

spying on American citizens . . . where I come from, they call that paranoia . . .