Congress did this because TIA was an obvious and serious threat to the constitutional rights of the American people. However, these days, the Straussian neocon controlled Pentagon and the White House do not take orders from the American people and TIA is alive and well, as revealed by Shane Harris of the National Journal.

“A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens,” Harris writes. “Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.” In other words, it appears TIA was merged with the NSA’s current snoop effort under the control of the perfidious Straussian neocons.

Sen. Ron Wyden, instrumental, along with Feingold, in closing down the original TIA, grilled Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and FBI Director Robert Mueller earlier this month. Wyden asked if it was “correct that when [TIA] was closed, that several… projects were moved to various intelligence agencies…. I and others on this panel led the effort to close [TIA]; we want to know if Mr. Poindexter’s programs are going on somewhere else.” Negroponte and Mueller claimed ignorance, although Negroponte’s deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, until recently director of the NSA and unaware that the Fourth Amendment requires probable cause, said, “I’d like to answer in closed session.” In short, Hayden admitted that TIA was alive, well, and kicking the Bill of Rights in the drawers.

Harris notes:

The NSA is now at the center of a political firestorm over President Bush’s program to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who the agency believes are connected to terrorists abroad. While the documents on the TIA programs don’t show that their tools are used in the domestic eavesdropping, and knowledgeable sources wouldn’t discuss the matter, the TIA programs were designed specifically to develop the kind of “early-warning system” that the president said the NSA is running.

In other words, we would be foolish to believe the TIA “tools” are not being used to snoop the American people.

“ARDA now is undergoing some changes of its own,” Harris continues. “The outfit is being taken out of the NSA, placed under the control of Negroponte’s office, and given a new name. It will be called the ‘Disruptive Technology Office,’ a reference to a term of art describing any new invention that suddenly, and often dramatically, replaces established procedures. Officials with the intelligence director’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.”

Disruptive technology, indeed—disruptive of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Obviously, the NSA is too hot for this “early-warning system,” a system we are told is designed to snoop “al-Qaeda” phone calls and instant messages (sent from caves), and it will now be moved into its own digs and continue to operate.

Echelon, Carnivore, Magic Lantern, etc., these are all “systems” designed to render our former constitutional republic into a sprawling Panopticon, or surveillance prison. “A government engaging in escalating criminal actions and becoming more and more secretive should not be watching and tracking us as if we’re all criminals,” write Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones. “This is systematic. They built the electrically wired cage around us and then they turned it on. The state is doing all this for the moment when they take your pension funds, private property, and guns because you won’t be able to resist. Big Brother will be two steps ahead at all times and there will be nowhere to hide,” as Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s nightmarish dystopian novel, 1984, ultimately had nowhere to hide.

One thing is for certain—the Straussian neocons will continue to erect the Panopticon mass surveillance state, regardless what a few isolated members of Congress do or no matter how many lawsuits and FOIA requests are issued by a gaggle of so-called “civil libertarians” (they should call themselves Bill of Rights libertarians).

Bush, the front man for the Straussian neocons, is now for all practical purposes a dictator, a status that makes his “job easier,” as he told us before he was appointed to the presidency by Supreme Court fiat. Bush will now take his place in a long line of dictatores, from Lucius Sulla and Julius Caesar to Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. Mussolini and Hitler, however, never dreamed of the sort of awesome control and surveillance mechanisms at the disposal of the Straussian neocons, who like Mussolini and Hitler also have dreams of conquest and never-ending war and nihilistic destruction.