Total Information Awareness was a post-9/11 Defense Department research program, written about publicly when it was introduced, to sift through and analyze vast amounts of information looking for potential signs of terrorist activity. The program was even to include security against abuse and privacy protections. But when Congress got wind of it, it stopped authorizing funds for the program.

That’s when it went underground, so to speak, and the security and privacy protections were thrown out.

TIA was the brainchild of John Poindexter, former Reagan national security adviser, whose name was tarnished by his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. It used data mining and related analysis techniques to sift through vast quantities of records looking for suspicious activity that resembled the activity of terrorists before they carried out an attack. Perhaps that’s why TIA was described as the ultimate snooping machine from a “far-out Orwellian scenario.”

It wasn’t. But after Congress pulled its funding, that may well be what it became.

AsNational Journal revealed in February, the NSA’s Advanced Research and Development Activity took over TIA and carried on the experimental network in late 2003. ARDA continued vetting new tools and even kept the aggressive experiment schedule, still named after different winds, documents show.

But it discontinued some programs, most notably a multimillion-dollar effort to build privacy-protection technologies. ARDA also abandoned the effort to build audit trails in TIA, which would have permanently recorded any abuse by users.

The experimental network’s name was changed from TIA, to erase any connection to its past. Today it’s called the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration (RDEC, pronounced ARdeck). The NSA is the biggest player, with at least 15 nodes as of December 2004, according to official documents. “I think it’s considerably more today,” said a former government official knowledgeable about RDEC. A spokesman for the NSA said he had no information to provide about the network. — National Journal

Officials said parts of RDEC are probably in use in NSA’s terrorist surveillance program, revealed in the press last December and confirmed by President Bush.

I find it particularly ironic that Congress, in its infinite stupidity, and while ostensibly trying to protect the privacy of ordinary Americans, a feature of the original TIA program, wound up with a program which eliminated the privacy provisions. James Bamford, who has written two books on the NSA, commented that “the NSA was never supposed to be turned inward,” or in the words of former Sen. Frank Church, “no American would have any privacy left. . . . There would be no place to hide.”

But the data mining continues. Even the Department of Homeland Security has gotten in on the action with its own data mining program.