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  Total Information Awareness Lives On Inside the National Security Agency

More than two years ago Congress halted plans for a controversial plan called Total Information Awareness to create the world's largest surveillance database to track your phone calls, purchases, Internet usage, reading material, banking transactions. The National Journal has now revealed the program has quietly continued inside the NSA.

Democracy Now! - 02/27/06

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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. The National Journal reports that TIA was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency - known by its acronym DARPA - to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the NSA. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

The issue resurfaced earlier this month when, during a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

• Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon questioning John Negroponte, the head of Domestic Security, Robert Mueller, the head of the FBI and General Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA, about the project.

We are joined by Shane Harris, the reporter for the National Journal who wrote the story "TIA Lives On".

• Shane Harris, reporter for the National Journal.

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