:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 6.25.2003 ::

:: TIA update ::

From CNET News.com:
Senator presses Pentagon on spy plan
By Declan McCullagh

Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who wrote legislation requiring a report on the Total Information Awareness project, asked on Tuesday for the Pentagon to respond to 11 pointed questions about the project's scope, its implications for privacy and civil liberties, and which private-sector and government databases would be linked into the system.

"I remain very deeply concerned that TIA technology will be used to plow through large amounts of private information on individual Americans in the United States in search of hypothetical threat situations," Wyden said in a three-page letter to the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The Pentagon claims that TIA, which it has renamed to Terrorist Information Awareness in response to public criticism, is a promising collection of technologies that can track patterns in databases and provide advance warning of terrorist incidents. TIA will mine other databases but will not create a master computerized dossier on every American, DARPA says.

Earlier this year, in a triumph of privacy concerns over worries about terrorist threats, Congress required DARPA to prepare a report on what laws would cover a final implementation of TIA. In a 102-page report dated May 20, DARPA said TIA would track transactions that "would form a pattern that may be discernable in certain databases to which the U.S. government would have lawful access."

In his letter on Tuesday, Wyden asked for additional details ...

posted by me

:: 8:43:00 AM [+] ::
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