WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 (UPI) -- A controversial counter-terrorism program has quietly continued despite being theoretically ended two years ago. The Department of Defense's Total Awareness Information program was halted by lawmakers more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates. However, it was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens, the National journal reported Thursday.
The TIA program developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States. Its research was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group that builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, the National Journal said.
The publication cited documents it had obtained and intelligence sources. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts, the Journal said.
Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., the National Journal said. These included the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA, it said. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.