Total Information Awareness

Total Information Awareness (TIA) was a program of the United States Information Awareness Office that began during the 2003 fiscal year. It operated under this title from February until May 2003, before being renamed as the Terrorism Information Awareness.

Based on the concept of predictive policing, TIA aimed to gather detailed information about individuals in order to anticipate and prevent crimes before they are committed. As part of efforts to win the War on Terror, the program searched for all sorts of personal information in the hunt for terrorists around the globe. Admiral John Poindexter referred to it as a "Manhatten Project for Counter-Terrorism". According to Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), TIA was the "biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States".

The program was defunded alongside the Information Awareness Office in late 2003 by the United States Congress after media reports criticized the government for attempting to establish "Total Information Awareness" over all citizens.

Although the program was formally suspended, its data mining software was later adopted by other government agencies, with only superficial changes being made. The core architecture of TIA continued development under the code name "Basketball." According to a 2012 New York Times article, the legacy of Total Information Awareness is "quietly thriving" at the National Security Agency (NSA).

Total Information Awareness (TIA) was intended to be a five year long research project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal was to integrate components from previous and brand new government intelligence and surveillance programs, including Genoa, Genoa II, Genisys, SSNA, EELD, WAE, TIDES, Communicator, HumanID and Bio-Surveillance with data mining knowledge gleamed from the private sector to create a resource for the intelligence, counterintelligence, and law enforcement communities. These components consisted of information analysis, collaboration, decision-support tools, language translation, data-searching, pattern recognition, and privacy-protection technologies.

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