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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

The irony of a Democratic-controlled Congress enshrining Total Information Awareness into law
Posted by Jill | 5:16 AM


Remember this?

TIA was the massive surveillance program to be run by Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter at the Pentagon that was defunded by Congress in 2003 as part of the 2004 defense appropriations bill.

As Eliot Cohen notes, S2248, the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 that would give Big Telecom retroactive immunity from prosecution for its role in the program (much of which went ahead anyway, at AT&T's San Francisco Hub) essentially makes TIA completely legal:

S. 2248 is now before the Senate Judiciary, and will be voted on in just a few days. Unless public opposition is once again vigilant and strong, this new TIA bill has a good chance of passing in committee and of reaching the full Senate floor. Unfortunately, the dire consequences of this legislation for the survival of democracy in America, including the potential to destroy fair elections, have been greatly muted, misrepresented, and downplayed by the mainstream media; and mounting pressure on Congress from both the Bush Administration and the giant telecommunication corporations have combined to increase the odds that S. 2248 will soon become law.

The bill would quash about 40 pending lawsuits against AT&T by granting it full retroactive legal immunity for its alleged role in helping the National Security Agency (NSA) acquire the contents of millions of domestic and international electronic messages sent by American citizens through the AT&T network. These messages were allegedly routed to secret rooms requiring NSA clearance hidden deep inside major AT&T hubs throughout the United States for purposes of building a massive data mine. This unprecedented surveillance offensive was first exposed in 2005 when an AT&T employee at the San Francisco hub blew the whistle.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization based in San Francisco that has filed a class action suit against AT&T, the company had installed a fiber-optic splitter at its San Francisco office that copies all e-mails and other Internet traffic passing through the system and deposits these copies into a separate government computer network. The EFF alleges that the secret NSA rooms, to which the copies are sent, contain "powerful computer equipment connected to separate networks. This equipment is designed to analyze communications at high speed, and can be programmed to review and select out the contents and traffic patterns of communications according to user-defined rules" (emphasis added).

With this cooperation from the telecoms, the Bush Administration now appears to have realized a major component of its TIA project, a publicly denounced program that was presumed to have been abandoned by the Bush Administration. The purpose of this project was to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness." In its present form, the integrated surveillance network has the capacity to maintain fully searchable copies of the contents of all electronic communications of American citizens. Since there is virtually no judicial oversight, the Bush Administration now has a blank check to define its search criteria any way it wishes, not only to look for terrorists but also for anyone else it may deem a threat -- including investigative reporters and political opponents.


It would be the most hideous of ironies if the one program whose very logo conjures up tinfoil hattery with its slogan of "Scientia est Potentia" -- Knowledge is Power -- and its eye-in-the-pyramid symbol -- were to be enshrined in law, not by Republicans who have marched in lockstep with this aspiring dictator of a president, but by the party that's been the only place to look to apply the brakes to this march towards fascism.

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