- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
TIA, when it was told to shut down, moved out of the government into a large number of contractors and startup companies, many with Poindexter on the Board. It re-coalesced again in Singapore as IRAHS, or RAHS, depending on the source. They had a big meeting for the launch over there, and it included all the people from over here. From there it was quietly brought back into this country again, already tested.
This database is older than TIA, or Project Genoa. Not that the two are inconsistent, and in all probability part of the same thing now. All the state and local databases are also being hooked up, as well as FBI databases.
One of the deep pieces in the FISA amendment was that it left the minimizations completely untouched, but changed the targeting completely. That made it possible to claim that the same safeguards were in place while the scope of the surveillance changed. But a note from the White House complaining about the "Leahy bill" (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/11/20071114-9.html), the only version of the FISA amendments that contained language about rollbacks, indicates pretty clearly that the FISA court has already seen fit to allow collection without rollback under the current minimization laws, that's why they didn't touch that language. The page curiously complains about rolling back databases, even though at the time you would of thought that the rolling back would apply mostly to AI and data mining programs, filters, and suspicion lists. This new information about Main Core shows why.
The American public should rightfully ask which members of Congress knew about this when they were voting on FISA, and why the public wasn't told about the way the pieces interacted to dramatically expand the ability to add data to this database, all with previous knowledge that the FISC would acquiesce. Obviously some people knew or figured it out, because the SJC/Leahy bill contained language to stop it, which never made it into a single other version of the bill.
No bernbart, this isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a conspiracy. It's good to be paranoid about government power, that's what "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" really means. The alternative is,
It starts when you're always afraid,
Step outta line, the men come, and take you away.
Are you a reporter or a congressional staffer, by any chance?
