:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 5.21.2003 ::
:: TIA update ::
From Wired:
Pentagon Defends Data Search Plan
By Ryan Singel
The Pentagon submitted a report to Congress on Tuesday that said the Total Information Awareness program is not the centralized spying database its critics say it is.
In fact, according to the report, the Total Information Awareness program is not even the Total Information Awareness program anymore.
Instead, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which administers the program, has changed the name to "Terrorism Information Awareness."
The agency said the original name "created in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens," according to its website.
The 108-page report (PDF) and summary (PDF) offer details on various components of the program, which has generated controversy due to concerns about its impact on civil liberties.
The report stresses that "safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of Americans is a bedrock principle." It also says the project is still in its early stages of development, although it revealed that the Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery project, part of TIA, has been used to analyze and find relationships in information received from interrogations of Guantanamo Bay detainees.
However, some critics of the plan were not convinced by promises to protect against abuses.
"The report is disappointing -- after more than a hundred pages, you don't know anything more about whether TIA will work or whether your civil liberties will be safe against it," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "DARPA is constantly trying to assuage privacy concerns. Their mantra is, 'We always operate within current law.'"
posted by me
:: 9:15:00 PM [+] ::
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