2003 US-Congress defunded the Total Information Awareness project (TIA) of Bush Administration's. TIA was part of the counterterrorism program of Bush Administration's and was qualified as a massive Orwellian technology-driven surveillance and data mining initiative.
2004 President Bush signed an order that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop Americans without the usual requisite warrants. The domestic surveillance program ramps up.
In December 2005 the cooperation of AT&T with NSA spying program was dicovered to the public by the whistleblower Mark Klein.
- The NSA has unlimited real-time access to the telefon and internet communication of AT&T costumers.
- The NSA has unfettered access to the 300 TByte large Daytona database of AT&T with fon and mail communication records.
- A fiber-optic splitter was installed in San Fransisco that copies all internet traffic passing through the system into a NSA computer system.
According an ex-NSA member, AT&T has similar operations in place in as many as 20 other sites. These surveillance activities are in violation of the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the U.S. Constitution. Civil liberties proponents like EFF.org and ACLU sues AT&T and NSA to stop warrantless eavesdropping.
2008 The Obama Administration's would give phone companies retroactive immunity for breaking the law in cooperation with the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program! At first the bill was rejected but it passed the Congress in 2011 with FISA paragraph 802a.
2012 Expansive new guidelines were signed, allowing the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) to mirror entire federal databases containing personal information and hold onto the information for an extended period of time -even if the person is not suspected of any involvement in terrorism. It proposed fusing vast archives of electronic records — like travel records, credit card transactions, phone calls and more.
2013 the infrastructure for the Total Information Awareness project will be ready. The new NSA datacenter in Bluffdale (Utah) will be ready. This new datacenter for $2 billion will be a great storage for all sniffed telecommunication data like phone claas, e-mails, Google searches and so on. For more information about you may read The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center in Wired magazine.
10 years after defunding by Congress the Total Information Awareness project was realized piecemeal by the administration. The effects in counterterrorism are very low, it generally played a limited role in counterterrorism efforts.
Update (23 Apr 2012): The William Binney was the key source for the wired article about the new NSA datacenter in Bluffdale. He served in the NSA for over 30 years. In his first first television interview since he resigned from the NSA he speeks about the Orwellian state surveillance. Other interview parnters are Jakob Apelbaum and Laure Poitras.
