Remember Total Information Awareness? It never ended.

[kentuck]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/06/07/u-s-never-really-ended-creepy-total-information-awareness-program/

<snip>

Farber recalled that shortly after 9/11, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency initiated “Total Information Awareness,” a surveillance program that called for recording and analyzing all digital information generated by all U.S. citizens. (See Wikipedia for a history of the program.) After news reports provoked criticism of the Darpa program, it was officially discontinued. But Farber suspected that new surveillance programs represent a continuation of Total Information Awareness. “I can’t get anyone to deny that there’s a common thread there,” he said.

In fact, this week’s news reports that the U.S. has been carrying out what is in effect a Total Information Awareness program should not have come as a huge surprise. Last year, long-time spy-watcher James Bamford revealed in WIRED that the National Security Agency is building a vast, $2 billion facility in Utah “to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.”

Bamford asserted that the facility, called the Utah Data Center, “is, in some measure, the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.”

.....more

[GeorgeGist]

1. Some terrorists are listening ...

[frazzled]

2. But as you know, its components were legally assigned to different departments

And we knew that. Or at least anyone who followed the Congressional and judicial actions over the years did. So if you're trying to say this has come in through the back door, you're wrong. Congress and the courts have allowed components of the technological programs to persist ... just not in a separate governmental unit without oversight. So whether we like it or not, it's "legal."

To wit:

Despite the withdrawal of funding for the TIA and the closing of the IAO, the core of the project survived.[5][6][27] Legislators included a classified annex to the Defense Appropriations Act that preserved funding for TIA's component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies. TIA projects continued to be funded under classified annexes to Defense and Intelligence appropriation bills. However, the act also stipulated that the technologies only be used for military or foreign intelligence purposes against foreigners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

[Egalitarian Thug]

3. If only someone had warned us...

This, and "we told you so" are going to be our national epitaph.

Or maybe, "La, la, la, la I can't hear you" is more appropriate.