Total Information Awareness is Alive and Unwell
Spread the word, folks - Total Information Awareness, which was supposed to have been axed by Congress years ago, in fact never went away. Total information Awareness is still running, but in secret this time, inside the NSA under the code names “basketball” and “topsail”. This comes from an article by Shane Harris at the National Journal.
That’s right - when I say NSA, that’s the National Security Agency, also now known as Now Spying Againstya, as a result of its program to spy against Americans without even trying to get a legally required search warrant. Figure that - the same people who have been spying on you on Bush’s orders have also been building up a gigantic computer database to track your every move.
Every credit card purchase you make, every email you write, every toll booth Speedpass you use, every library book you borrow, every medical record you have ever had is to be fed into the Total Information Awareness database in the NSA. Think hard now, and remember back just a few weeks ago when the news came out that Google refused a Bush White House demand that it turn over data about how its users were moving around the Internet?
This TIA resurrection is in addition to the parallel program running over at CIFA - the military’s Counterintelligence Field Activity office, which is developing its very own system to use “the leading edge information technologies and data harvesting and storage capabilities” to collect information about the private lives of law-abiding American citizens.
And now the White House and the Congress are pushing renew the Patriot Act, with all the controversial ability to conduct unconstitutional seizures of private information about your private activities. Only Senator Russ Feingold has had the guts to stand in its way.
The pieces all fit, snug as a bug in a rug. By the way - have you checked to see if the NSA has put a bug in your rug? Big Brother is here, and he doesn’t know how to pronounce “nuclear”.
The thing that bothers me most is that there’s really no way anymore to “see if the NSA has put a bug in your rug.” There’s no way to know what the government is doing, how much the government is watching you, or what the government will do next. I wince when I write this, but I have the feeling of being given a one-way ticket to a police state.
Yes, and our United States Senators and Representatives are all too eager to jump on board and give our emperor the power. Here, emperor - won’t you take this Patriot Act? Please!
This is too much like the opening scenes of Julius Caesar to be borne.
war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength
What about that odd echo on the phone when you talk to certain people, what about the ‘URL not found’ message when you type certain names in the Email text, but the retry sends with no problem.
doubleplusungood.
[...] fact, as was pointed out a while ago here, the Total Information Awareness program never died. It just went underground in the National [...]
[...] Originally, that database was to be housed at DARPA, in an office run by John Poindexter, of Iran Contra infamy. However, when the Total Information Awareness project was discovered, it was moved over to the National Security Agency. [...]