Total Information Awareness Lives On

NATIONAL JOURNAL: TIA Lives On (02/23/2006)This Shane Harris penned story discusses how aspects of the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program, supposedly ended by legistators after public uproar and vehement opposition by privacy advocates, has been continued under other names in different government agencies.

With a "deep throat" type of informant, Harris claims to have uncovered a very active program continuing under code names

... according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

These programs are funded under secret intelligence programs and while that keeps details from view, it doesn't stop a bit of random speculation.

I'll hesitantly step out on a limb here and suggest that BILLIONS are accessible to fund these programs through obfuscation and claimed losses and diversions of cash that have passed through just one source. That source is Iraq and supposed "missing" money that was passed out, in cash, by the wheelbarrow full to Iraqis.

Nine BILLION dollars is claimed to be "missing" and unaccounted for by those in charge of those funds. Further BILLIONS have gone missing through Haliburton and other infrastructure rebuilding firms absorbing massive funding in Iraq rebuilding.

Redirecting "missing funds" to secret projects is very likely, but even if this little scenario were a complete fantasy, there is funding available to programs the Bush administration strongly supports. There will be a way found to fully fund Total Information Awareness, no matter what it is called to hide its existence.

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