EOTO #2: Total Information Awareness

 

Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a project created after September 11th, 2001 to be able to track global terrorists movements online. TIA was created by a branch of the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the Information Awareness Office.

The idea for Total Information Awareness was invented by John Poindexter, a Reagan administration official. His idea for it was to "access all sorts of digital information from just about anywhere".

There was an interview that asked Poindexter about his ideas for Total Information Awareness, how it started out, and how it became what people know it as today.

The goal of TIA seems harmless, until you learn what has to be collected from citizens to achieve this. TIA collects every piece of information that can be tracked online for it to be analyzed by computers to determine if any of it resembles suspicious or terrorist activity.

Any information that can be collected is. From credit card transactions to text messages and call logs, the government collects it all.

Then the information is fed through computers or robots to seem if it resembles terrorist or suspicious activity. However, the government holds on to this information and it is not deleted after the robots are done scanning it.

This means that the government holds on to this information just on the off chance they need to use it in following years, without the public knowing about it. Every digital action or purchase you make is never deleted and follows you for the rest of your life.

As seen above, the logo resembles the Illuminati, which was unsettling with people. It gave people the feeling that they were being watched constantly by the government and they had no privacy.

In 2005, it was discovered by a reporter that worked at the New York Times that major phones companies such as Verizon and AT&T were giving the NSA unprecented access to Americans' telephone and internet communication.

When the public discovered this, they were outraged. They felt that their privacy was being violated by the government and that they were not planning on telling the public that they were doing this if they were not caught.

In recent years, it was discovered that President Bush authorized this. People found it hard to believe that they could trust the government and the President if they authorized such an insane request.

The public's outrage over the Total Information Awareness program led Congress to the decision to defund it. However, reporters have found that TIA has lived on through different names in order to continue with their end goal.

One of the different names TIA took on after it was defunded by Congress was PRISM. 

The government hid the continuation of TIA by moving their budget over to the "black budget". This is the side of the government budget that they do not want the public to find out about, so they try to keep it a secret.

Today, we have a similar program called CAPS II. This program collects massive amounts of information or data on citizens in order to create profiles on Americans that take flights.

This program is still based on the premise that terrorism can be prevented by collecting massive amounts of information about everyone and then running it through computers or robots to see if they flag anything.

Even though the government claims to stop these programs, they will always try to keep them going. By keeping them going, the government retains its power it holds over the American people by collecting all of their data.