One Utah

Remember the Bush administration’s Big-Brotherish Total Information Awareness (TIA) program? It was the brainchild of Admiral John Poindexter, who is probably best known for his part in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. When TIA became public knowledge, it was immediately obvious that everything about it was unconstitutional and even totalitarian. In February of 2003, Congress passed legislation suspending the program. Eight months later, Congress terminated TIA, supposedly forever.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article by Siobhan Gorman that confirms what many have long suspected: Total Information Awareness never went away, it just got secretly transferred to the National Security Agency (NSA). The secret version of the program (name unknown) does without Poindexter and the creepy TIA logo, but everything else is the same.

On Talking Points Memo, Paul Kiel summarizes how the secret NSA program works:

[I]nto the NSA’s massive database goes data collected by the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Treasury. This information includes data about email (recipient and sender address, subject, time sent), internet searches (sites visited and searches conducted), phone calls (incoming and outgoing numbers, length of call, location), financial information (wire transfers, credit-card use, information about bank accounts), and information from the DHS about airline passengers.

Then the NSA’s software analyzes this data for indications of terrorist activity. When it hits upon a suspicious pattern, the NSA “feeds its findings into the effort the administration calls the Terrorist Surveillance Program and shares some of that information with other U.S. security agencies.”

Readers of One Utah may recall that the DHS list of suspected terrorists has something like a million names on it, nearly all of them erroneous. Basically, the NSA computers are processing in GIGO mode (garbage in, garbage out). The few thousand real terrorists working with al Qaeda don’t use phones or e-mail.

If impeachment is off the table, then why isn’t this years-long, enormous violation of privacy at least an issue in the presidential election campaign? I would like to hear a candidate say that Bush has made America into a surveillance society, running a blatantly illegal operation that has turned up “no credible information” about actual terrorists.

At least George Orwell’s Big Brother was competent. Our government is being run more like the one in Terry Gilliam’s movie “Brazil,” where the Ministry of Information pretty much defined bureaucratic incompetence and unconcern about the rights of innocent citizens.

This entry was posted Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under 2008 Election, Civil liberties Infringement, George W. Bush, Impeachment, National Politics, Terrorism, The Constitution, This Blog, Wiretapping, the Internet. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.