In 2003, Congress voted to shut down a controversial program called Total Information Awareness (TIA). The project, which would have linked major information databases together in order to “hunt for terrorists,” was shut down primarily because of privacy concerns, but also because its main advocate was Adm. John Poindexter, known for his involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. Wired.com reported at the time that US senators from both parties, saying “they feared government snooping against ordinary Americans,” voted to block funding for TIA. It now appears, however, that the controversial program, which was first brought to the public’s attention in 2002, is continuing. The National Journal reported Thursday that TIA “was stopped in name only” and has been continued within the National Security Agency (NSA), the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of US citizens in the domestic wiretapping scandal. Research under the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness program – which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States – was moved from the Pentagon’s research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security […]