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NSA End Run Gave It Total Information Awareness
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-03-26
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When Congress ended funding for TIA in 2003, the Bush Administration simply packed up the pieces and sent them to the National Security Agency.
TIA now stands for Terrorism Information Awareness. Operating as a secret program buried in black ops budgets, it sifts through emails, cellphone calls, and other domestic surveillance, data collection, and data mining.
Security expert Bruce Schneier said, "The result is essentially the same as Total Information Awareness."
On its face, the program presents itself as a benevolent reviewer of trivial information, like the dates and subjects of emails, at it seeks out potential leads on terrorists before they can strike.
No judge's signature is needed to approve gathering extensive information through TIA. All an agent needs is an administrative subpoena from the FBI to look at activity stemming from a phone number or an IP address.
We have the protection from terrorism in place, and a way for law enforcement to act upon intelligence quickly. This seems to be what people want, but more than what we actually got from TIA. For one thing, the Wall Street Journal indicates the brakes are off when it comes to accelerating a review of someone through TIA:
Two current officials also said the NSA's current combination of programs now largely mirrors the former TIA project. But the NSA offers less privacy protection.
TIA developers researched ways to limit the use of the system for broad searches of individuals' data, such as requiring intelligence officers to get leads from other sources first. The NSA effort lacks those controls, as well as controls that it developed in the 1990s for an earlier data-sweeping attempt.
The stage for broader, discretionary surveillance has the ACLU concerned:
I mean, when we warn about a "surveillance society," this is what we're talking about. This is it, this is the ballgame. Mass data from a wide variety of sources -- including the private sector -- is being collected and scanned by a secretive military spy agency. This represents nothing less than a major change in American life -- and unless stopped the consequences of this system for everybody will grow in magnitude along with the rivers of data that are collected about each of us -- and that's more and more every day.
Security pros regularly balance the tradeoffs between privacy and security in their jobs. The issue people have with TIA or whatever the NSA calls the program now concerns its deep tilt towards security. No one wants to see someone innocent command the attention of TIA and end up in dire straits because of it.
View All Articles by David Utter
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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