Total Information Awareness…

…and just to have something to give me bad dreams, I gleaned this nugget by Spyder from the comments in Barlow’s blog.  Totally un-fact-checked, but bound to be true…

UPDATE: Total Information Awareness Lives

Congress voted to shut down the Pentagon’s controversial Total
Information Awareness program in 2003 (though not before it was renamed
“Terrorism Information Awareness” — sound familiar?).

During a Senate hearing last week, General Michael Hayden was asked
whether TIA had simply been “moved to various intelligence agencies”
after Congress tried to terminate it. As ThinkProgress noted, Hayden
stonewalled:

SEN. RON WYDEN (D-OR): I and others on this panel led the effort to
close it [Total Information Awareness]. We want to know if Mr. [John]
Poindexter’s programs are going on somewhere else. Can anyone answer
that? …

    HAYDEN: Senator, I’d like to answer in closed session.

In fact, the answer is yes.

[T]oday, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename
of Topsail (minus the futures market), two officials privy to the
intelligence tell NEWSWEEK. … “It is truly Poindexter’s brainchild. Of
all the people in the intelligence business, he has the keenest
appreciation of using advanced information technology for intelligence
gathering,” [says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval
Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.]. Poindexter, who lives just
outside Washington in Rockville, Md., could not be reached for comment
on whether he is still involved with Topsail."