TIA shut down
The US Govt has voted to kill off the remainder of the TIA program. A few minor projects will continue as part of DARPA, but will be prohibited from use for domestic surveillance.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has led a campaign against the [Total/Terrorism Information Awareness] program, hailed the result Wednesday. “Americans on American soil are not going to be targets of TIA surveillance that would have violated their privacy and civil liberties. The government is not going to be able to pick Americans up by their ankles and shake them to see if anything funny falls out,” Wyden said in an interview.[...]
“The conferees agree with the Senate position which eliminates funding for the Terrorism Information Awareness program within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” the conference report said in a section Wyden released. “The conferees are concerned about the activities of the Information Awareness Office and direct that the office be terminated immediately.”
In addition to the data-scanning project, other TIA efforts that cannot be pursued by DARPA under the conferees’ agreement include projects to identify people at a distance by using radar or video images of their gait or facial characteristics.
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 to automatically translate foreign documents and broadcasts.
And it said, “The conference agreement does not restrict the National Foreign Intelligence Program from using processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence purposes.”
– Fox News, Pentagon Office That Funded Terror Spying Project Closed.