TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS

An excerpt from Democracynow.org's lead story yesterday:

In 2003, lawmakers voted to shut down Total Information Awareness - a program that developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States.
Months earlier New York Times columnist William Safire had warned about the dangers of the program. In a column headlined "You Are A Suspect" Safire wrote:

"If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:
"Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend -- all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as 'a virtual, centralized grand database.'

"To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you -- passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance -- and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

"This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks."

Following public outcry, the program was halted primarily because of privacy concerns, but also because its main advocate was John Poindexter, known for his involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.

It now appears that the project "was stopped in name only" and that TIA is in fact continuing.


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