And, yes, I DO take it personally: Total Information Awareness

By Barry Steinhardt, director the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project.

Yesterday’s report in The Wall Street Journal about the NSA’s domestic spy dragnets should be major, major news. It is nothing less than the return of TIA: "Total Information Awareness." Yet there has been barely any followup coverage of the story in the mainstream media. I know the media thinks the sexual behavior of the governor of New York is earth-shatteringly important for American life – but this NSA report actually is.

I mean, when we warn about a "surveillance society," this is what we’re talking about. This is it, this is the ballgame. Mass data from a wide variety of sources – including the private sector – is being collected and scanned by a secretive military spy agency. This represents nothing less than a major change in American life – and unless stopped the consequences of this system for everybody will grow in magnitude along with the rivers of data that are collected about each of us – and that’s more and more every day.

The TIA program, you may recall, was a massive Pentagon plan (run by Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame) to tap into as many databases containing personal information about Americans as possible (program materials listed "Financial, Education, Travel, Medical, Veterinary, Country Entry, Place/Event Entry, Transportation, Housing, Critical Resources, Government, Communications"). All that information would then be pulled together and scanned for "suspicious" patterns. Given the density of the "data trails" that we all create in our daily lives today and in the future, it was a recipe for the routine surveillance of Americans and their every move.

TIA was supposed to have been killed off by Congress in 2003 amid widespread objections to its sweeping Orwellian scope. There have been always been hints about a secret annex to the law that permitted some limited aspects of TIA to operate within the Pentagon’s black budget for intelligence and with respect to foreigners only. Now it appears that, like a vampire that can’t be killed except with a stake through its heart, TIA has arisen again from its coffin in full body with its voracious appetite for privacy of Americans and foreigners alike.

The reporter on the Journal piece, Siobhan Gorman, describes stunning new spying capabilities that flow from a distributed collection of new domestic spying capabilities (each of which the ACLU has long warned against):
TIA and data mining more broadly

The NSA’s illegal wiretapping program, the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP)

The Patriot Act’s broadening of FBI power to collect third-party personal information without a subpoena through Section 215 searches and National Security Letters.

The Treasury Department’s expanded surveillance of financial transactions through Cash Transaction Reporting and Suspicious Activity Reporting.

The CIA’s illegitimate access to the SWIFT database to monitor international financial transactions.

DHS’ efforts to increase collection and monitoring of airline passenger data.

Partnerships between government agencies and private sector entities to collect and monitor customers’ data and transactions.

The erosion of privacy through the judicial creation of a distinction between content and "transactional" or "addressing" information (such as the recipients of e-mails or phone calls and the times and dates of each communication) through the Patriot Act and prior developments.
In the ongoing battle over FISA and the NSA’s warrantless spying program (which appears to be but one part of this larger effort), the government has been saying in effect, "trust us." Why should we trust an agency that has been running this secret program in contravention of the Wyden Amendment, the law passed by Congress shutting down TIA.
It’s time for Congress to find out exactly what is going on here, inform the public, and put a stop to what appears to be the construction of a sweeping infrastructure for the routine mass surveillance of innocent people.

anybody who wants to believe that this shit started with the bush administration is certainly entitled, but, when it all comes rolling out into the cold, hard light of day - as it will, eventually - there are many of us who will not be in the least bit surprised to learn that it's been going on at least since echelon was revealed in the mid-90s and probably for quite a bit longer than that...

Labels: ACLU, Bush Administration, domestic spying, FBI, FISA, NSA, Total Information Awareness