{you guys may have seen this info six ways to Sunday by now, or not. Anyway, I can’t believe that creepy IAO logo isn’t everywhere by now.}
Whoa! first link outta the gate and we’re already talking about the Masons and pyramids with eyeballs on top. Don’t wanna go there quite yet, let’s see:
The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe — including the United States.
As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.
Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.
In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.
Nov. 9, 2002
NY Times
Now back to the pyramids and eyeballs.
It’s unavoidable because this is the original Information Awareness Office logo:
via wikipedia
This logo, and the web page it rode in on, disappeared from the web shortly after the NY Times article quoted above appeared.
The Latin, scientia est potentia, means “knowledge is power”.
yikes indeed.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
“(DARPA) is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD). “
if you want to explore the masonic overtones follow these links.
from the electronic privacy information center
A key component of the TIA project was to develop data-mining or knowledge discovery tools that would sort through the massive amounts of information to find patterns and associations. TIA would also develop search tools such as Project Genoa, which Admiral Poindexter’s former employer Syntek Technologies assisted in developing. TIA aimed to fund the development of more such tools and data-mining technology to help analysts understand and even “preempt” future action.
from Wikipedia
On January 16, 2003, US Senator Russ Feingold introduced legislation to halt the activity of the IAO and the Total Information Awareness initiative pending a Congressional review of privacy issues involved. A similar measure introduced by Senator Ron Wyden would bar the IAO from operating within the United States unless specifically authorized to do so by Congress, and would shut the IAO down entirely 60 days after passage, unless either the Pentagon prepared a report assessing the impact of IAO activities on individual privacy and civil liberties, or the President certified the program’s research as vital to national security interests.
Congress passed legislation in February of 2003 halting activities of the IAO pending a Congressional report of the office’s activities.
DARPA changed the name of the “Total Information Awareness” program to “Terrorist Information Awareness” on May 20, 2003, emphasizing in its report to Congress that the program is not designed to compile dossiers on US citizens, but rather to gather information on terrorist networks. Despite this name change and reassurance, the description of the program’s activities remained essentially the same in the report, and critics continue to see the system as prone to massive Orwellian abuses.
from the electronic privacy information center
In September 2003, Congress eliminated funding for the controversial project and closed the Pentagon’s Information Awareness Office, which had developed TIA. This does not, however, necessarily signal the end of other government data-mining initiatives that are similar to TIA. Projects such as the Novel Intelligence from Massive Data within the Intelligence Community Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) will apparently move forward. The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration are also working on data-mining projects that will fuse commercial databases, public databases, and intelligence data and had meetings with TIA developers.
