Total Information Awareness

John Poindexter has created a number of interesting and useful programs through DARPA that have been prematurely shutdown by congressional ignoramuses. One was the Terrorism Futures program (refer to http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59818,00.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market ) which was an 'idea market' and one of the most promising and accurate intelligence tools for predicting future terrorist threats. Congress's decision to cut funding was purely an example of political posturing and, as is often the case, had no basis in logic or a desire to actually enhance our intelligence capabilities. This "Policy Analysis Market" as it was called was part of the larger Information Awareness Office which, to which the article below refers, and was supposed to be dismantled when funding was cut. Thankfully the IAO programs were reassigned to another intelligence agency: DoD's Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) at Fort Meade in MD.

ADMINISTRATION
TIA Lives On

By Shane Harris, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget.

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

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