[infowar.de] Re: Check it out: ORF-ON FutureZone Artikel

[Bodo Staron <bodo -! - staron - de>]

Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
-------------------------------------------------------------

Hallo sven,

am Mittwoch, 16. Juli 2003, 13:07, hast Du folgendes geschrieben:

sun> Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
sun> -------------------------------------------------------------

sun> --------------------
sun> Der US-Senat hat stillschweigend das weltweit wohl umfassendste 
sun> Datenüberwachungsprojekt gekippt:

Das war eher einer der üblichen Politikertricks. Zuerst hat man das
Ding von Total Information Awareness in "Terrorism Information
Awareness" umbenannt. Und nun das angebliche killen des Programms.
Dazu Wired:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59606,00.html
Funding for TIA All But Dead
The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would
troll Americans' personal records to find terrorists before they
strike, may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John
Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies:
death by legislation.

The Senate's $368 billion version of the 2004 defense appropriations
bill, released from committee to the full Senate on Wednesday,
contains a provision that would deny all funds to, and thus would
effectively kill, the Terrorism Information Awareness program,
formerly known as Total Information Awareness. TIA's projected budget
for 2004 is $169 million.

TIA is the brainchild of John Poindexter, a key figure from the
Iran-Contra scandal, who now heads the research effort at the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Critics on the left and right have called TIA an attempt to impose Big
Brother on Americans. The program would use advanced data-mining tools
and a mammoth database to find patterns of terrorist activities in
electronic data trails left behind by everyday life.

The Senate bill's language is simple but comprehensive: "No funds
appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Defense
... or to any other department, agency or element of the Federal
Government, may be obligated or expended on research and development
on the Terrorism Information Awareness program."

The removal of funds from the program marks the strongest
Congressional reaction to TIA since it first gained prominent media
attention in November 2002.

The Senate likely will vote on and pass the bill early next week as
lawmakers hope to send the spending bill to the White House before
Congress recesses in August.

After the Senate votes, the provision's fate will be decided by a
joint committee, which will reconcile the Senate's bill with the House
version. The House version contains no explicit provision to deny
funds to TIA. But Congress watchers say opponents of the TIA likely
will succeed in killing it.

"The provision was added by the consensus of the committee," said
David Carle, a spokesman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, a member of the
Defense Appropriations subcommittee.

Carle also said that the drive to include the provision denying funds
was led by Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, who chairs both the defense
subcommittee and the appropriations committee.

"The defunding has a chance of surviving committee," said Ari
Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and
Technology. "If Stevens is behind it, then it almost certainly will
happen."

Both bills also seek to prevent the use of the data-mining system on
American citizens without Congressional approval. That provision was
included in the Senate version at the request of Sen. Ron Wyden.

Wyden, a prominent critic of the program, inserted a similar
limitation on TIA in a bill passed in February. His amendment also
required the Pentagon to submit a report to Congress or face loss of
funds for the program.

Darpa submitted the 108-page report to Congress on May 19. The report
detailed the program's many components and announced the renaming of
the program.

Privacy advocates lambasted the name change as "cosmetic." The
Electronic Frontier Foundation's analysis, which called the report a
"major disappointment," noted that discussions of privacy or civil
liberties issues were "conspicuously absent."



-- 
bye,
Bodo                         

=====================================================
Bodo Staron
Weidachstrasse 8
85748 Garching
Germany
Tel: +49/89/320 49 50
http://www.staron.org/
mailto:bodo -!
- staron -
 de
=====================================================



---------------------------------------------------------------
Liste verlassen: 
Mail an infowar -
 de-request -!
- infopeace -
 de mit "unsubscribe" im Text.