9/11 >USA PATRIOT Act >> Total Information Awareness project >> LifeLog >> Facebook
Sept. 11, 2001: Shit goes down
Oct. 26, 2001: President George W. Bush signs into law the USA PATRIOT Act
January 2002: The DOD establishes the Information Awareness Office in the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)
FY2002: The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is officially commissioned
Nov. 20, 2002: Under Secretary Aldridge reveals the existence of the program when tells a press conference that funding for the Total Information Awareness System is $10 million in FY2003
December 2002: Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra found ConnectU (originally HarvardConnection)
Jan. 24, 2003: The Senate votes to limit the TIA program
Feb. 7, 2003: Under Secretary Aldridge reiterates that funding for the TIA project is $10 million in FY2003 and $20 million in FY2004
May 2003: The Pentagon rebrands Total Information Awareness as Terrorism Information Awareness
June 2003: DARPA starts soliciting proposals to develop LifeLog
2003: Zuckerberg meets Priscilla Chan at a Harvard party for Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi
Sept. 30, 2003: Congress defunds the TIA program and the Information Awareness Office
… But legislators write a classified annex to that document that preserves funding for TIA's component technologies – if they are transferred to other government agencies
November 2003: The Winklevoss twins and Narendra approach Zuckerberg about joining the HarvardConnection team
The core architecture of TIA continues to be developed under the code name 'Basketball.'
As of September 2004: Basketball is fully funded by the government and being tested in a research center jointly run by ARDA and SAIC
The former TIA programs that become Topsail and Basketball mirror descriptions of Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) and NSA technologies for analyzing vast streams of telephone and e-mail communications
Jan. 11, 2004: Zuckerberg registers domain name thefacebook.com
Late January 2004: The Pentagon drops LifeLog
Feb. 4, 2004: Zuckerberg launches TheFacebook.com website
May 21, 2004: The Winklevoss twins launch the ConnectU (originally HarvardConnection) social networking site
A 2004 survey by the U.S. General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, finds federal agencies operating or developing 199 data mining projects, with more than 120 programs designed to collect and analyze large amounts of personal data on individuals to predict their behavior.
The accounting office excludes most of the classified projects, meaning the actual numbers likely are far higher.
February 2006: Reports emerge that the NSA now has the supposedly defunct Total Information Awareness (TIA) project
2012: CIA mouthpiece New York Times reports that the legacy of Total Information Awareness is 'quietly thriving' at the NSA.
TECHNOLOGY; Many Tools Of Big Brother Are Now Up And Running
Dec. 23, 2002
nytimes.com/2002/12/23/business/technology-many-tools-of-big-brother-are-now-up-and-running.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm
[Spin alert!]
The civilian population, in other words, has willingly embraced the technical prerequisites for a national surveillance system that Pentagon planners are calling Total Information Awareness.
The development has a certain historical resonance because it was the Pentagon's research agency that in the 1960s financed the technology that led directly to the modern Internet.
… the Total Information Awareness project … is overseen by John M. Poindexter, [who] was convicted in 1990 of a felony for his role in the Iran-contra affair …
RED CROSS!
Dr. Poindexter … raised the possibility that the control of the Total Information Awareness system should be placed under the jurisdiction of an independent, nongovernmental organization like the Red Cross because of the potential for abuse.