TIA won't die

Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a Pentagon project that Congress pulled the plug on about 4 years ago. Bruce Schneier's blog points to a Wired article about TIA being reborn in Singapore.

For those who don't remember TIA, it was basically the database to rule them all. Every piece of data about every person combined with some alogrithms to mine the data for potential threats to the U.S. Trusting computer's to find meaningful relationships among data is a risky prospect. An even scarier thought is having a government organization like the Department of Homeland Security trusting a computer to do intelligence analysis for them and acting on the results.

Last year, reports came out that the National Security Agency took over TIA. And now Singapore has a prototype of the system, now called Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning (RAHS). According to a consultant on the project, "Essentially it's a strategic tool that ties together every one of the agencies in a government into a large network that is constantly scanning the horizon looking for weak signals that point toward the possibility of a significant event that would have important implications for Singapore".

The article is an interesting read. It wouldn't surpise me if TIA makes a comeback in the U.S.