Total Information Awareness Under A New Name

[kpete]

TIA (aka Topsail) unveiled: the real scope of the NSA's domestic spying program
5/11/2006 1:47:03 PM, by Hannibal


USA Today just went to print with some alarming new details on the NSA's citizen surveillance activities, and I've put together a few more pieces that show more revelations will probably come out. What USA Today has uncovered is, it appears, one piece of a larger program that's identical to the infamous Total Information Awareness (TIA) program that Congress has tried to nix multiple times over the years and that lives on under the codename Topsail. The program was transferred from its original home at DARPA to the NSA, and has been active for years.

Communications metadata and The Big Database in the Sky

The new USA Today article reveals that the NSA has been collecting and archiving "transactional information" on all domestic calls made within the US—who called whom, when, from where, etc. The transactional data is acquired from cooperating telcos (AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, but not Qwest) and fed it into a massive database so that the NSA can analyze the collected calling patterns for clues as to possible terrorist activity. Contrary to what the government has publicly claimed about the NSA's massive signals intelligence (SIGINT) vacuum, there is no requirement here that one end of the call be located in a foreign country; we're talking about calls between me and my grandmother, and in fact about every call I've ever made over the past few years.

More to come

The original revelations about the NSA's SIGINT vacuum were just the tip of the iceberg, and the new revelations show us just a little bit more of the beast. Based on a few fairly recent stories we've run here at Ars, it appears there's probably more that we've yet to see. Much more.


LOTS MORE AT:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060511-6813.html

[democrank]

1. Honestly, I`m so mad I can hardly see straight.

Going to mull all this over for a couple of days then figure out what actions I can take.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

2. Excellent post! Thanks! K & R.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

3. X-Admiral Poindexter has to be involved in this in some capacity.

[Patsy Stone]

4. Well, why not?

They've shown with their penchant for misdeeds at the Watergate that they have no originality. It only follows that they'd keep a program they liked and just rename it. :eyes:

Wow, this whole thing just stinks.

[Canuckistanian]

5. Good catch!

This is just a retread of the same bullshit that was turned down by Congress.

They sure retracted it without a fight, now, didn't they?

Now we know why.