Senate panel sets deadline for NSA database deal

[struggle4progress]

July 6, 2006
By Sarah Lai Stirland, National Journal's Technology Daily

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is pushing the National Security Agency to further open its databases of raw signals intelligence to a wider audience within the intelligence community. But the effort comes at a time when Congress, courts and the privacy community are closely scrutinizing the legality of the agency's surveillance activities.

The committee ordered the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to arrive at an agreement by the end of August to extend access to NSA's databases to more DIA analysts ...

To better enable information sharing, the committee has inserted a provision in the bill establishing a pilot program that would exempt the intelligence community from privacy law -- if the information is relevant to "a lawful and authorized" foreign intelligence or counterintelligence program ...

Privacy advocates have expressed concern about these and other recommendations made by the Senate intelligence committee's fiscal 2007 authorization bill because they have not been publicly debated. The Center for National Security Studies has asked Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., to hold public hearings on parts of the bill ...

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=34481&dcn=todaysnews

[chill_wind]

1. The Total Information Awareness Project Lives On (under NSA?)

At the end of the article:

The Center for National Security Studies has asked Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., to hold public hearings on parts of the bill.

"The question is: What are the general rules here about the NSA sharing information about Americans' communications with other agencies?" said Kate Martin, director of the center. "That has been something that has been public in the past, and should be public now."

"What this is eliminating is one of the few existing legal protections against Total Information Awareness," she said, referring to a doomed Pentagon database citizen surveillance project that Congress nixed on a few years ago.

**********************

It's interesting that she and the author say that. The degree to which TIA has been 'doomed' or defunct seems open to question...

"April 26, 2006
The Total Information Awareness Project Lives On

Technology behind the Pentagon's controversial data-mining project has been acquired by NSA, and is probably in use.

By Mark Williams

(...)

In February 2006, the controversy intensified. Reports emerged that component technologies of the supposedly defunct Total Information Awareness (TIA) project -- established in 2002 by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop advanced information technology to counter terrorists, then terminated by Congress in 2003 because of widespread criticism that it would create "Orwellian" mass surveillance -- had been acquired by the NSA.

Washington's lawmakers ostensibly killed the TIA project in Section 8131 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal 2004. But legislators wrote a classified annex to that document which preserved funding for TIA's component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies, say sources who have seen the document, according to reports first published in The National Journal. Congress did stipulate that those technologies should only be used for military or foreign intelligence purposes against non-U.S. citizens. Still, while those component projects' names were changed, their funding remained intact, sometimes under the same contracts.

Thus, two principal components of the overall TIA project have migrated to the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), which is housed somewhere among the 60-odd buildings of "Crypto City," as NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD, is nicknamed. One of the TIA components that ARDA acquired, the Information Awareness Prototype System, was the core architecture that would have integrated all the information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. According to The National Journal, it was renamed "Basketball." The other, Genoa II, used information technologies to help analysts and decision makers anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks. It was renamed "Topsail."

much more (3 pages)
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=infotech&sc=&id=16741&pg=1#DiscussionPanel_messageBody

Seems likely that some highly select members of Congress may know a great deal more about this inner can of NSA/TIA worms than they wiil ever want scrutinized...?