Total Information Awareness Lives On Inside the National Security Agency
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And in early 2002, the Pentagon created at DARPA something called the Information Awareness Office and put Poindexter in charge of it, and this office really was meant to build TIA and to look into things like data mining, pattern recognition, software that can translate something from Arabic into English text automatically and kind of tie all these together in a sort of big prototype, which was called at the time “TIA,” and that office was in charge of it.
When news broke that this had been going on for several months, the controversy was sort of fanned, not only by the privacy concerns that are raised by something like this, but also by Poindexter, at least being the titular head and the brainchild of all this, and the program was then shut down, essentially, in name only. In the 2004 Defense Authorization Act, this being the bill that authorizes the government to spend money on defense programs, TIA and most of its components were specifically eliminated under DARPA, and there was sort of a loophole that was left open that funding could continue for certain projects out of the National Foreign Intelligence Program, which is the black budget of the intelligence community.
At that point the project sort of went behind that black curtain, and no one was really sure where they had gone, but what my reporting now has confirmed is that really quickly after Congress shut down TIA at DARPA, a new sponsor came forward, this new sponsor being this Research and Development Office that’s actually housed at NSA headquarters, not far from outside of Washington here, and picked up the projects, changed their names to conceal their identities, kept the same contractors that were working under TIA in place, kept the same language, the same specifications, and really just continued the work, and presumably has expanded significantly from where it was three years ago.
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Send in the Clowns (2003) by Rootsie
This newest permutation of ancient conspiracy
with imperial fantasy
of world ascendancy
looks like a clown convention to me.
my, these boys love to play.
The catchy logo of the new
Information Awareness Office IAO
is the good old Masonic pyramid, its hairy eyeball
shooting lurid yellow beam
over an unsuspecting little earth:
“Scientia est Potentia” written underneath
knowledge is power. Well of course.
IAO-“I am the Alpha and the Omega.”
Now there’s some balls.
Apparently they think their big bad
New World Order is in the bag.
They manipulate images
Put finishing touches on oily messages,
But the bag is leaking all over
Its greasy contents smearing everything.
Of the true juju behind those symbols they flaunt
They know not. Not a clue.
If they did, like me and you
they would breathe into peace,
see enough everything for everybody
and be mad lovers.
They don’t look like lovers, not much,
so gray, so overstuffed.
Look the best they can do
is to hold off the new earth coming
this way, impervious to their cartoon ray.
Their silly suits, their sad eyes,
their wizard hats and magic wands-
I think it’s time
we laughed ‘em out of town. Don’t you?