I Told You So

Via Comrade Josh's TPMMuckraker.com comes the news that the print edition of National Journal is now reporting that— not only was the Total Information Awareness program never actually killed when Congress ordered it stopped— but that No Such Agency's Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) has stripped out all the abuse protections and opened it up to the whole "intelligence community" to abuse.

As National 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. . . 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.

TPMMuckraker.COm summarizes a bit from the article, "the program is now accessed by, among others: the NSA, the CIA, DIA, CENTCOM, the National Counterterorrism Center, the Guantanamo prison, and Special Operations Command (SOCOM)."

I told you this was happening. It was obvious to me when Donald Rumsfeld responded to a question at a press gaggle about the Congress killing TIA by saying basically that Congress can say whatever it wants, but the Pentagon will continue doing whatever it feels like doing. That was almost three years ago.