TIA under fire

Earlier this year, Congress passed an amendment to a budget bill that banned the used of any funds for the implementation of the "Total Terrorist Information Awareness" program being developed by John Poindexter at DARPA without further authorization from Congress. Now Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii wants to suspend funding for the program all together, and currently has at least the tacit approval from Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, who is the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Without fanfare, senators debating defense spending for next year have proposed eliminating all money for the Pentagon's development of a vast computerized terrorism surveillance program that has raised privacy concerns.

In the past, Congress has limited the Defense Department's ability to implement the system now known as Terrorism Information Awareness while allowing research to proceed, but the new provision goes further to ban funding outright.
"No funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Defense ... or to any other department, agency or element of the federal government, may be obligated or expended on research and development on the Terrorism Information Awareness program," the provision says.

If this is passed by the Senate, there will have to be a conference with members from the House to reconcile the bills - currently, the House bill would only extend the current ban-without-further-approval for another year. Either would be an excellent move, but obviously the Senate version would do considerably more damage to the TIA program as a whole, and thus would be my choice.

I'm just glad, though, to see that Congress isn't just sitting back and letting this program get developed and implemented without taking the time to exercise caution about it and seriously consider if our tax dollars should really be spent on helping the Pentagon (or who knows who else) poke through every aspect of our lives.

Posted by thorswitch at July 16, 2003 08:32 AM | TrackBack