The next big secret to be outed?

A couple of days back we speculated about what new, formerly secret Bush-administration horror might come out. I speculated about death squads. Some may have thought that a bit dramatic. For those who thought so I offer a less freaky, albeit still chilling alternative: Total Information Awareness never really died. Its technology is actually at the center of the NSA wiretapping scandal, and that's the real reason why the Bushlings wouldn't go to the FISA court.

I missed it the first time I read it, but Sen. Jay Rockefeller's letter refers to "John Poindexter's TIA" and also to not being a "technician or an attorney" but nonetheless speaks of being very troubled by what he heard in his one briefing back on July 17, 2003.

For those who have forgotten, Total Information Awareness was a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same agency that created the fledgling Internet back in the sixties) initiative headed by John Poindexter, who had been brought in to the Pentagon strictly for this assignment. Poindexter, you may remember, has a shady past in that he was indicted and convicted for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, so he may be genetically aligned with extralegal enterprises.

The initiative was so alarming that former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (Rep-TX), a staunch conservative, dubbed it "a real menace to our privacy" and called for its immediate dismantling.

As the Armey memo points out, TIA was to be a program "to aggregate a massive amount of personal information into a central, government controlled database for military, intelligence, and law enforcement use." Under severe pressure from the time its existence became known, TIA was thought to have been abandoned.

Here's what cartoonist Bill Mitchell thought about TIA. Courtesy CNN, Nov.21, 2002.

A Reuters story from Jan. 23, 2003 shows that the Senate tried to block funding over concerns about both the potential for abuse and John Poindexter's reputation. This document shows the Congress succeeded on Sept. 24, 2003.

I've just discovered a web page from EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) that covers its concerns about TIA, along with history and links to documents. Although the Congress did its best to stop the development of new technologies for data-mining, there are reasons to believe that these efforts were not wholy curtailed.

All this leads me to believe that we've got more to fear from the increasingly Orwellian Bushlings.

(Hat tips to TPM and DailyKos.)