According to this article (my interpretation, anyways) it looks like certain privacy safeguards that were to be put in place with Poindexters original version of Total Information Awareness have been omitted from the current version of the data mining plan. The disgraced former Admiral's plan has been reborn under other names and other agencies (notice the clever revisionist renaming of the old version: Terrorism instead of Total... much more palatable to the general public, yes?).
However, because the original project, with it's proposed "privacy tools" was cancelled, the claim seems to be that there is no funding for the original safeguards. Can anyone tell me what the heck is really going on here? It sounds like our representatives are also bamboozled. I'm just about ready to declare "Shenanigans".
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/bw-cong/2004/mar/15/031502039.html
"Two cutting-edge computer projects designed to preserve the privacy of Americans were quietly killed while Congress was restricting Pentagon data-gathering research in a widely publicized effort to protect innocent citizens from futuristic anti-terrorism tools."
...
"But Congress allowed some Poindexter projects, including some data-mining research, to be transferred to intelligence agencies. Congress also left intact similar data-mining research begun in the fall of 2002 by the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA, a little-known office that works on behalf of U.S. intelligence.
The research sponsored by ARDA, called Novel Intelligence from Massive Data, is so similar to some work done for Poindexter that Lunt offered to adapt her privacy protection software. ARDA and other agencies weren't interested because Congress had killed the original projects."