Total(itarian) Information Awareness

The official logo of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness office, established 2002. This logo is no longer available on their website
Note that the Masonic "all seeing eye" on top of the pyramid is looking at the Middle East ...
Since TIA no longer wants to display their original logo on their webpage -- paid for with US citizen's tax money -- perhaps this logo would be a better alternative ...

 

MI-5 chief: Some day, Mr. Fiennes, you will have the entire population under permanent 24 hour surveillance. Will you be happy then?
Fiennes (his assistant): Happy? Satisfied.
from the TV drama "A Very British Coup"

 

The Pentagon's Information Awareness Office - established by Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter to spy on everyone, everywhere, all the time

Meet Big Brother - John Poindexter and the Iran Contra Reunion Tour
www.hereinreality.com/bigbrother.html

A websearch on "Poindexter Costa Rica" will bring up lots of articles on why Poindexter is permanently banned from the country of Costa Rica (cocaine trafficking to fund the illegal Contra terror war).

 

Poindexter was forced to resign in the summer of 2003 for his bizarre "betting pool," which would have enabled Pentagon stafers to bet on the probability of future terror attacks in the US. Perhaps Poindexter's betting pool was merely the Pentagon's effort to solicit suggestions for the next "Operation Northwoods" or "Reichstag Fire" (Northwoods was a 1962 Pentagon proposal to stage phony terror attacks on US citizens to provide a pretext to invade Cuba.)

Sure, Poindexter's betting on the next terror attacks (whether real or staged) is repugnant, but it would be nice for a real investigation to happen about 9/11.

 

 

 

 

http://washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20070308-124323-4382r

Homeland Security revives supersnoop
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published March 8, 2007

Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.
The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

 

www.prorev.com/2008/06/anti-terrorism-centers-dont-have-enough.html

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 2008
ANTI-TERRORISM CENTERS DON'T HAVE ENOUGH BUSINESS, SO WHY NOT SPY ON ALL OF US?

SECRECY NEWS Fusion centers are collaborative law enforcement and intelligence organizations that were established all over the country after 9/11 to share intelligence and counterterrorism information. But in the absence of a widespread domestic terrorist threat, they have not consistently demonstrated their value, according to a recent study.

"Fusion centers emerged almost spontaneously in response to a need by state and local law enforcement for useful and usable intelligence related to the evolving terrorist threat," observed Milton Nenneman, a Sacramento police officer, in a master's thesis based on a survey of California fusion centers. But the terrorist threat has turned out to be "insufficient" to justify or sustain the new fusion centers.

"There is, more often than not, insufficient purely 'terrorist' activity to support a multi-jurisdictional and multi-governmental level fusion center that exclusively processes terrorist activity," Lt. Nenneman wrote.

As a result, "Fusion centers must consider analyzing or processing other criminal activity, in addition to terrorist activity, in order to maintain the skills and interest of the analysts, as well as the participation and data collection of the emergency responder community."

Basic questions regarding who the fusion centers are supposed to serve and exactly what they are supposed to produce often lack satisfactory answers, Lt. Nenneman reported.

 

 

www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/12/bank_regs_boost_data_mining/

Bush Admin demands more banking data
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Published Tuesday 12th April 2005 16:02 GMT

The Bush Administration plans to extend its mighty neural networks to international banking in hopes of discovering terrorist activity, the New York Times reported in its Sunday edition.
The scheme would allow the US Treasury Department to maintain databases of international money transfers to and from the USA, creating an additional regulatory burden on banks struggling to comply with myriad regulations already imposed by the so-called "Patriot" Act.
The result of this additional data mining, the article suggests, will be a flood of largely irrelevant data to federal agencies already awash in irrelevant data. But the Administration's overall approach has been to get all the data it can now, and figure out how it might be used to catch terrorists later.
Since the Administration's grand schemes for monitoring the public's every move, such as the MATRIX and Total Information Awareness (TIA), fell into disrepute, it appears to be taking a piecemeal approach, building its surveillance society one step at a time.
We now have, or have in the works: biometric, RFID drivers' licenses following a federal standard with state motor vehicle databases linked electronically, as required by the Real-ID Act; biometric, RFID passports; bulk demands by the federal government for airline passenger records; the CAPPS - now called "Secure Flight" - airline data mining scheme; and banking and other financial data in federal hands, and enriched with personal data from retail privacy invaders like ChoicePoint.
All of these components can, and certainly will, be correlated, although the government hopes that the public will perceive them as discrete elements in the so-called war on terror, and not contemplate the eventual, cumulative effect of all this activity.
The public has rejected big gestures like TIA and MATRIX, but seems tolerant of incremental developments, like the new banking regulations now being worked out. With enough such steps, the TIA dream can be realized without public resistance.
So far, it appears to be on track.


http://cryptogon.com/2003_09_21_blogarchive.html

MATRIX (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) :.
Do you ever get the feeling that They're just doing stuff now in order to rub our faces in it? If I had come out, a few weeks ago, and said that a new law enforcement datamining/surveillance system called MATRIX was under construction, even you guys, who are basically nuts, would have emailed me and gently suggested that I should seek psychiatric care. So, for those of you keeping orderly records of The End, this one should be at the front of your I-Shit-You-Not-File:

www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/33006.html

The perverse dream of integrating law enforcement, military intelligence and vast databases of virtually everything done by virtually every citizen is coming to fruition, only under state, not federal, auspices.
DARPA's dreaded Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, formerly administered by convicted felon and Republican hero John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame, may have been de-clawed by Congress, but it lives on at the state level in an incarnation called, ominously, the MATRIX (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange).
There's a lot to dislike in this new end-run around Congressional oversight. For one thing there are federal dollars behind it -- four million from the Department of Justice -- which makes it clear that the Feds will be expecting a payoff.
It also appears that the scheme is geared more towards data mining in quest of garden-variety criminal activity than anything to do with international terrorism. When you combine that with federal interest, it's hard to resist seeing the MATRIX as a sneaky way for three-letter agencies to keep tabs on ordinary folk and their foibles, side-stepping restrictions on domestic spying instituted since the Church Committee.

 

www.politechbot.com/p-04234.html
What's so bad about Total Information Awareness? by Ben Brunk

 


As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions . .. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider's web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence.... Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads.
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

http://aspe.hhs.gov/datacncl/1973privacy/c3.htm
Reprinted by HHS with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. from Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, English translation of Part I © The Bodley Head Ltd. 1968; Part 11 © The Bodley Head Ltd. 1969.