Or, why you should care where the spies come from
Yesterday I wrote a brief history of the use of commercial datamining operations and the DARPA Total Information Awareness program; an intelligence technology umbrella that would pull data from all conceivable surveillance systems and mine them for "terrorist-like" behavior. This system was initiated just after 9/11/2001, cost eighteen bazillion dollars, and was killed by Senate on Sept 24, 2003. The program was ordered to be dismantled, with specific named exceptions that were to be used for foreign surveillance only. Supposubly.
Strangely enough, some of these dates match up to the AT&T warrantless wiretapping program.
Mark Klein's testimony tells how the NSA interviewed technicians and installed their big black boxes in 2002 through 2004. And maybe beyond. Coincidence?
An article in Technology Review inferred that the equipment and technology used by the NSA for the warrantless wiretapping in Room 641-A and beyond had its origin in the TIA.
Washington's lawmakers ostensibly killed the TIA project in Section 8131 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal 2004. But legislators wrote a classified annex to that document which preserved funding for TIA's component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies, say sources who have seen the document, according to reports first published in The National Journal. Congress did stipulate that those technologies should only be used for military or foreign intelligence purposes against non-U.S. citizens. Still, while those component projects' names were changed, their funding remained intact, sometimes under the same contracts.
Thus, two principal components of the overall TIA project have migrated to the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), which is housed somewhere among the 60-odd buildings of "Crypto City," as NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD, is nicknamed. One of the TIA components that ARDA acquired, the Information Awareness Prototype System, was the core architecture that would have integrated all the information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. According to The National Journal, it was renamed "Basketball." The other, Genoa II, used information technologies to help analysts and decision makers anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks. It was renamed "Topsail."
...
Whether the specific technologies developed under TIA and acquired by ARDA have actually been used in the NSA's domestic surveillance programs -- rather than only for intelligence gathering overseas -- has not been proved. Still, descriptions of the two former TIA programs that became Topsail and Basketball mirror descriptions of ARDA and NSA technologies for analyzing vast streams of telephone and e-mail communications. Furthermore, one project manager active in the TIA program before it was terminated has gone on record to the effect that, while TIA was still funded, its researchers communicated regularly and maintained "good coordination" with their ARDA counterparts.
The ACLU has filed an amicus brief requesting that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein's documentation be made public and studied, to see if this is true.
Computer security expert Bruce Schneier blogged about this in April 2006, and someone commented that "a few ... pieces of the old TIA" are (or were in 2006) over at Global InfoTek, Inc.
Wouldn't it be interesting to cross reference some names and email addresses and see if there are some links to explain this goatrope? Gee, I'd love to go Big Brother on Big Brother and find all these little relationships.
My question is: Does the current FISA bill issue also offer immunity to government agencies and employees? If so, doesn't that mean the the people who broke the law and continued the TIA program under different names and agencies would be immune from prosecution?
I'm starting to understand how and why conspiracy theorists become so.