Turley: Big Brother Bush's "Total Information Awareness"

[marmar]

'Big Brother' Bush and connecting the data dots
Submitted by davidswanson on Sat, 2006-06-24 23:09. Spying
The Total Information Awareness program was killed in 2003, but its spawn present bigger threats to privacy.
By Jonathan Turley, http://www.latimes.com

JONATHAN TURLEY is a law professor at George Washington University.

THE DISCLOSURE this week of a secret databank operation tracking international financial transactions has caused renewed concerns about civil liberties in the United States. But this program is just the latest in a series of secret surveillance programs, databanks and domestic operations justified as part of the war on terror.

Disclosed individually over the course of the last year, they have become almost routine. Yet, when considered collectively, they present a far more troubling picture, and one that should be vaguely familiar.

Civil liberty-minded citizens may recall the president's plan to create the Total Information Awareness program, a massive databank with the ability to follow citizens in real time by their check-card purchases, bank transactions, medical bills and other electronic means. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was assigned this task, but after its work was made public, Congress put a stop to it in September 2003 as a danger to privacy and civil liberties.

However, when Congress disbanded the Total Information Awareness program, it did not prohibit further research on such databanks, or even the use of individual databanks.

The rest of the article is at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/12332

[bluestateguy]

1. Turley is an asshole who supported the Clinton impeachment

He is also a publicity hound who likes being on TV and getting his name in the newspaper.

I have a long memory, and I still do not forgive him.

[leesa]

3. I suggest you do get over it because he is a major voice in this fight

against warranties spying. We need him. Clinton is fine so let it go.

[teryang]

2. This sort of data collection is characteristic of totalitarianism

The making of lists and creating files of personal information.

You'll know we're in the final stages when instead of just watching your accounts, they just take them.