From AP:
When public outcry forced Congress to eliminate funding for the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program, which had been developing powerful tools to mine millions of public and private records for information on U.S. citizens, it left undisturbed a separate but similar $64-million research program at DoD’s Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) unit, using some of the same contractors who had worked on the TIA effort. “The whole congressional action looks like a shell game,” says a spokesman for the Federation of American Scientists. “There may be enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical work is continuing.” ARDA sponsors corporate and academic research on information technology for U.S. intelligence agencies, and is developing computer software dubbed “Novel Intelligence from Massive Data,” which performs many of the same kinds of data-mining activities rejected by opponents of TIA. The ARDA project is vastly more powerful than other data-mining activities such as the Department of Homeland Security’s CAPPS II program to classify air travelers or the six-state, Matrix data collection system funded by the Justice Department.
