Senate Blocks TIA funding

[bungle bliss]

Senate Blocks Funding for Computer Dragnet

Thu Jul 17, 8:55 PM ET Add Technology - Reuters to My Yahoo!


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday to cut off funding for a widely criticized computer-surveillance program that would comb travel records, credit-card bills and other private records to sniff out suspected terrorists.

In a military spending bill it passed unanimously, the Senate forbade the Defense Department to spend any portion of its $369 billion budget on the Terrorism Information Awareness program, brushing aside a request by the Bush administration to keep development efforts intact.

"No funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Defense .... may be obligated or expended on research and development on the Terrorism Information Awareness program," the bill said.

The fate of the $54 million program will likely be determined in negotiations with the House of Representatives, which forbade the Pentagon (news - web sites) from using the program on U.S. citizens without permission but did not cut off funding when it approved its version of the Pentagon's budget earlier this month.

more at link- http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030718/tc_nm/tech_surveillance_dc_1

[Mirko]

Originally posted by bungle bliss
In a military spending bill it passed unanimously, the Senate forbade the Defense Department to spend any portion of its $369 billion budget on the Terrorism Information Awareness program, brushing aside a request by the Bush administration to keep development efforts intact.
They're just going to have to spend that $54 million of the $369 billion on a few more tanks in the West Bank instead.

Edited to delete the first word; and also: I guess military "aid" to Israel comes out of a whole different budget. Maybe the $54 million could go back into the veteran's benefits that were so ruthlessly slashed recently.

[Modesa Bling]

thats bullshit.

[burnt]

hey, I was gonna ask you the other day.......how come your status reads "moron"???

Moderators.........can I get elevated to Moron Status? :D

[HexRei]

Originally posted by burnt
hey, I was gonna ask you the other day.......how come your status reads "moron"???

Moderators.........can I get elevated to Moron Status? :D

it's because he's one of stalker nick's accounts. We mark them all when we catch them as a warning to innocent nwteknoer's.

[HexRei]

in response to the article, great.
The TIA project was fucking evil, the only thing I could ask for now is that it be killed entirely.

[Mirko]

WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — The Pentagon office that was developing a vast computerized terrorism surveillance system would be closed and no money could be spent to use those high-tech spying tools against Americans on U.S. soil, House and Senate negotiators have agreed. But they shifted some of the high-powered software under development to different government offices, to be used to gather intelligence from U.S. citizens abroad and foreigners in this country and abroad.

Among the items shifted was research on collaborative software designed to allow U.S. agents to connect the dots between disparate items of intelligence now scattered among different federal agencies, a senior Senate aide said Thursday.

The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program was conceived by retired Adm. John Poindexter and was run by the Information Awareness Office that he headed inside the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

...

SOME PROJECTS CONTINUE

The conference wrote that four, noncontroversial projects in TIA could continue at DARPA: two to develop software for wargaming future terrorist attacks and the response to them, a project to speed detection of bioterror attacks, and one to develop software that automatically translates foreign documents and broadcasts.

The conferees also wrote, “The conference agreement does not restrict the National Foreign Intelligence Program from using processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence purposes.”

The senior Senate aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the conferees had agreed to shift some of the TIA’s high-powered software tools to agencies involved in gathering foreign intelligence — information about foreign intentions, plans and capabilities gathered from foreigners or U.S. citizens abroad or from foreigners in this country. The CIA, State Department, Defense Department and other federal agencies participate in the foreign intelligence program.

The Senate aide could not spell out precisely which tools were shifted, how much money was shifted or which agencies received the tools and research funds because those details of the National Foreign Intelligence Program are classified.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, described the conference agreement last Thursday as shifting the antiterror surveillance program out of DARPA but not eliminating it. Stevens did not release any text of the conference report then, and the portion released Wednesday did not make clear whether the conferees agreed to move the money for some or all of the TIA research from DARPA to one or more other agencies or merely left open the possibility of doing so later.

Poindexter, who was forced to resign as former President Reagan’s national security adviser over his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, quit DARPA last month under fire over the surveillance program.

The conferees agreement on the 2004 defense bill is expected to be approved by both houses.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/971869.asp?0bl=-0&cp1=1

[HexRei]

yup, just read about this, great news