Link to Letter

Wyden Questions Defense Department in Response to
“Total Information” Report
Senator remains “deeply concerned” about proposed surveillance program

June 24, 2003

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) today responded to a May 20, 2003 report from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) detailing plans for a proposed “Total Information Awareness” Program (TIA), now called "Terrorism Information Awareness," at the Department of Defense. Wyden, who won passage of legislation requiring a comprehensive report on TIA, told Dr. Anthony Tether of DARPA that the May report raises numerous questions about proposed uses of technology in TIA. The program, which the Defense Department now has renamed “Terrorism Information Awareness,” is the most sweeping surveillance program ever proposed in this country and a potential threat to the privacy and civil liberties of every American.

“Your report states that ‘the TIA Program is not attempting to create or access a centralized database that will store information gathered from various publicly or privately held databases.’ Nonetheless, it is clear that the TIA Program will access any number of such databases and then sort through the information,” Wyden wrote. “Accordingly, I remain very deeply concerned that TIA technology will be used to plow through large amounts of private information on individual Americans in search of hypothetical threat situations.”

The questions in Wyden’s letter cover a number of privacy and civil liberties issues, including what information will be obtained for TIA and how, whether citizens will be used voluntarily or involuntarily when some technologies are tested, and sat information will be made available to Congress as the program moves forward. A copy of the Wyden letter follows this release, and can also be found on the web at http://wyden.senate.gov/leg_issues/letters/06242003_tia.pdf

Links to the TIA report and information on Wyden’s defense of privacy and civil liberties issues can be found at http://wyden.senate.gov/leg_issues/issue/science.html#tia