TIA lives, in other forms

TIA's not dead, apparently.

According to the AP, a variety of the information-gathering programs thought up by the Poindexter-led DARPA team have been outsourced to different agencies in the government:

Disturbed by the privacy implications, Congress last fall closed Poindexter's office, part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and barred the agency from continuing most of his research. Poindexter quit the government and complained that his work had been misunderstood.

The work, however, did not die.

In killing Poindexter's office, Congress quietly agreed to continue paying to develop highly specialized software to gather foreign intelligence on terrorists.

In a classified section summarized publicly, Congress added money for this software research to the "National Foreign Intelligence Program," without identifying openly which intelligence agency would do the work.

It said, for the time being, products of this research could only be used overseas or against non-U.S. citizens in this country, not against Americans on U.S. soil.

Congressional officials would not say which Poindexter programs were killed and which were transferred. People with direct knowledge of the contracts told the AP that the surviving programs included some of 18 data-mining projects known in Poindexter's research as Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery.

Let's not forget about MATRIX, either. That's a classic case of how the government can outsource dirty work to the private sector.

There, much of this data mining can be accomplished with minimal amounts of oversight, since a lot of the technology can be lumped under harmless consumer research and initiatives that serve to facilitate information sharing between state and local law enforcement agencies.