UPDATE: Congress Nixes Total Information Awareness (link via Smart Mobs)
Total Information Awareness update at Science Blog.
The Department of Defense will establish two boards to provide oversight of the Total Information Awareness Project, the program designed to develop tools to track terrorists. The two boards, an internal oversight board and an outside advisory committee, will work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as it continues its research. These boards will help ensure that TIA develops and disseminates its products to track terrorists in a manner consistent with U.S. constitutional law, U.S. statutory law, and American values related to privacy.
Members of the outside advisory board are:
Newton Minow (chairman), director of the Annenberg Washington Program and the Annenberg Professor of Communications Law and Policy at Northwestern University;
Floyd Abrams, renowned civil rights attorney;
Zoe Baird*, president Markle Foundation; A New York blue-blood foundation funding “development of innovative media products and services”.
Griffin Bell*, former U.S. Attorney General and Court of Appeals judge;
Gerhard Casper, president emeritus for Stanford University and Professor of Law;
William T. Coleman*, former chairman and CEO of BEA (world’s leading application and infrastructure company) and now Chief Customer Advocate; and
Lloyd Cutler*, former White House Counsel.
* - 4 out of 7 definitely on the hard-core conservative, and politically connected side. Possibly have a financial interest in wide-spread implemantation of technologies developed by TIA.
Now for a little “taking out of context”:
“TIA has never collected, and has no plan or intent to collect privately held consumer data on U.S. citizens…This is and will continue to be the responsibility of the US foreign intelligence/counterintelligence agencies”.