Peek-a-boo

I see you. And hear you. And monitor everything you do.

Via TPMmuckraker, comes the word that, like Mark Twain once observed, reports of TIA's death were greatly exaggerated. As Justin Rood noted:

Congress attempted to kill the ill-conceived Terrorist Information Awareness program in 2003. But instead, the Rasputin-like program -- designed to somehow find terrorists from a sky-high pile of credit card bills, car rental receipts and travel records -- came back, bigger and stronger and arguably worse than ever, National Journal's Shane Harris reports.

The National Journal article, available at GovExec, Two controversial counter-terror programs share parallels, is an excellent article, that describes the background and relationship of TIA and NSA. Defense Tech, in You can run . . ., explains:

Over the last few months, it's become increasingly clear that the NSA's eavesdropping is intertwined with Total Information Awareness, the notorious uber-database project. In the new National Journal, scoopster Shane Harris shows just how tightly the two are knotted together.

Bottom line: after Congress supposedly pulled the plug on TIA, the NSAÂ’s Advanced Research and Development Activity "took over TIA and carried on the experimental network in late 2003."

Liberal Comment adds:

Where this administration is concerned, you can't keep a bad idea down. Total Information Awareness, you may recall, was a program conceived in 2003 by John Poindexter, the former National Security Advisor to Ronald Reagan who was convicted on five felony counts during the Irangate scandal. The idea behind TIA is to create a system that will scan the bank and credit card statements, telephone bills, travel history, library records and, presumably, internet browsing habits of every American, ostensibly to identify patterns that would indicate people who are likely to commit acts of terrorism. Even the Republican Congress got cold feet when it learned the extent to which TIA would impede on the civil liberties of Americans, and in 2003 killed funding for the program.

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I think the government should have the tools it needs to prevent terrorism. I even support many parts of the Patriot Act, especially the elements that enable better information sharing between intelligence and law enforcement. But TIA is a bad idea, period. It will allow overzealous investigators and intelligence analysts to go on broad fishing expeditions that will inevitably ensnare innocent Americans (of course, you will never hear about such injustices, because the information will be classified). Authoritarian Republicans might argue that we should trust our leaders with such unchecked, unprecedented power to peer into the most private aspects of our lives. Fine. Will they trust a future Democratic president such as Hilary Clinton with that same power? If you show me a government that has never abused the powers granted it, I will show you an Iraq War supporter who likes Michael Moore.

And at what point do we acknowledge that we are we no longer a Democracy?

Tags: Civil Liberties, NSA, TIA