TIA Goes MIA: Senate Defense Bill Cuts Surveillance Funds

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July 18, 2003 (11:49 AM EDT)

TIA Goes MIA: Senate Defense Bill Cuts Surveillance Funds

A name change barely two months ago may not have been enough to save the controversial Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program, formally known as Total Information Awareness.

The $369 billion Department of Defense (DOD) budget the Senate unanimously approved Thursday included no funding for the data mining initiative, which had been a lightning rod for civil libertarian and privacy advocate ire since its existence was made public last year.

While some observers expected a compromise TIA funding arrangement to be reached with the House, that body's own version of the bill, passed earlier this month had already severely restricted the program's ability to access electronic records.

Born as the Total Information Awareness project at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), TIA always struck some observers as more talk than technology. Its promise of casting a wide electronic "dragnet" over databases of all sorts, and from that net identifying real and potential terrorist activity struck a chord of suspicion with the public, and a chord of skepticism among seasoned IT watchers.

"From a technology perspective, it was never clear that the program was going to work anyway," said Jim Hurley, information security analyst at research firm Aberdeen Group. "It always gave the impression of being a research project rather than something that was going to be operational in six months or so."

Intentional or not, the program sent a Big Brother message from the get-go. What has become in retrospect a near-deathbed name-change followed a series of public relations blunders including the appointment of still-controversial Reagan-era national security official John Poindexter as its head. Nor did the Information Awareness Office's motto, "Scientia Est Potentia" (Knowledge Is Power) escape media mockery.

The program has been in trouble at least since January as the senate passed the Data Mining Moratorium Act of 2003, essentially shutting down all DOD and Homeland Security data mining activities "similar related to the Total Information Awareness program."

But TIA was always bigger in the news than on the budget. The program's funding, cut Thursday, totaled $54 million.

"In the scheme of things, $54 million is a small number," Hurley said. He did not expect the potential demise of TIA to greatly affect IT companies looking for a piece of Defense or Homeland spending.

"It's not going to have much of an effect on suppliers and vendors," Hurley said. "We see most Homeland Defense spending going for a wider spectrum of technologies, with emphasis on transportation, embarkation and disembarkation. The money's going to go to real operations on the ground and in the air, not to research."

He found it more interesting to speculate on why TIA had been so public about its pursuit of private information in the first place.

"This is typically the sort of stuff that gets funded out of black budgets," Hurley said. "You have to wonder what other agencies might be funding this type of research."