Total Information Awareness
 Total Information Awareness  (mass surveillance)   | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Founder(s) | John Poindexter |
Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a mass surveillance program by the United States Information Awareness Office, which operated under this title from February to May 2003 before being renamed Terrorism Information Awareness.
Predictive policing
Based on the concept of predictive policing, TIA was meant to correlate detailed information about people in order to anticipate and prevent terrorist incidents before execution. The program modeled specific information sets in the hunt for terrorists around the globe. Admiral John Poindexter called it a "Manhattan Project for counter-terrorism". According to Senator Ron Wyden, TIA was the "biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States".[1]
Surveillance State
US Congress defunded the Information Awareness Office in late 2003 after media reports criticised the government for attempting to establish "Total Information Awareness" over all citizens.[2]
Although the program was formally suspended, other government agencies later adopted some of its software with only superficial changes. TIA's core architecture continued development under the code name "Basketball". According to a 2012 New York Times article, TIA's legacy was "quietly thriving" at the National Security Agency (NSA).[3]
Palantir takeover
Palantir’s founder and largest shareholder, Peter Thiel, incorporated the company in the immediate aftermath of TIA's shut down—which resulted from prominent media and political criticism—with significant funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, as well as direct guidance from the CIA on its product development.[4] As Unlimited Hangout detailed in its investigation into Donald Trump’s 2024 running-mate J. D. Vance and his rise to MAGA stardom, Thiel and Palantir co-founder Alex Karp met with the head of TIA at DARPA, John Poindexter, shortly after Palantir’s incorporation.
The middleman between the tech entrepreneurs and Poindexter was Poindexter’s old pal and key architect of the Iraq War, Richard Perle, who called the TIA-head to tell him that he wanted him to meet “a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were starting a software company.” Poindexter, according to a report in New York Magazine, “was precisely the person” with whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon (that is, TIA), and they wanted to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.”[5] Since then, Palantir has been implementing the “pre-crime” initiatives of TIA under the cover of the “free market,” enabled by its position as a private company.[6]
References
- ↑ "Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans"
- ↑ "U.S. agencies collect, examine personal data on Americans"
- ↑ "Giving In to the Surveillance State"
- ↑ "A (Pretty) Complete History of Palantir"
- ↑ "Techie Software Soldier Spy Palantir, Big Data’s scariest, most secretive unicorn, is going public. But is its crystal ball just smoke and mirrors?"
- ↑ "The CDC, Palantir and the AI-Healthcare Revolution"
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