In the wee hours of the morning today i read an interesting excerpt from the NY Times quoted by swopa on his blog, Needlenose (
http://www.needlenose.com/...):
A similarly revealing sparring session came when Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, pressed the intelligence officials about whether a controversial Pentagon data-mining program called Total Information Awareness had been effectively transferred to the intelligence agencies after being shut down by Congress.
Mr. Negroponte and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, both said they did not know. Then came the turn of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who headed N.S.A. for six years before becoming the principal deputy director of national intelligence last spring.
"Senator," General Hayden said, "I'd like to answer in closed session."
So i went directly to the NY Times (not following swopa's link) and found the article about the Senate Intelligence hearing and that quote was not there. The rest of what swopa had quoted was there, word for word, but the paragraphs about Total Information Awareness were not. i thought swopa perhaps had found those paragraphs elsewhere and asked in comments where they came from. Silly me. i had gone to this article in the NY Times, written by Scott Shane:
http://www.nytimes.com/.... i had the idea to actually click on swopa's link at some point (it was the wee hours...) and he had actually linked to
this article by Scott Shane in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/.... Looking at the two articles side by side, the only difference i notice is the deletion of the paragraphs referencing the Total Information Awareness program.
Why would they go to the trouble of scrubbing the record if there was nothing to hide? And we thought TIA was dead!