TIA, the undead.

"Some antiterror efforts die--others just change names," observed the February 9 Christian Science Monitor. Among them is the Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative, which was discontinued amid concerns that its data-mining programs would be tantamount to strip mining privacy from the American public.

However, TIA seems to have been reincarnated as "a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE)," reports the Monitor. This data-mining--or "dataveillance"--program can "collect a vast array of corporate and online information--from financial records to CNN news stories--and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records."

"The system would then store it as 'entities'--linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events," according to a Department of Homeland Security report cited by the Monitor. That information would be shared with all federal, state, local, and private-sector security entities, which would be able to collaborate in real time "with distributed data warehouses that will provide full support for analysis and action." This would mean, in practice, that all security agencies would be absorbed as satellites of the Department of Homeland Security.

Another descendant of TIA is "Topsail," which "keeps alive TIA's core function of vacuum[ing] up as much US transactions information as possible, such as the purchase of plane tickets or, say, large amounts of fertilizer as a way of anticipating terror plots," wrote Newsweek's Michael Hirsh on February 8. TIA was created by Admiral John Poindexter, notorious for his felony convictions from his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. "Topsail" is "truly Poindexter's brainchild," comments John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.