Needlenose

Remember the awful Total Information Awareness project and the great hullabaloo  that killed it (or more likely drove it underground)?

Spy buddy sends me this guest post on a similar ‘mass surveillance’ system used to spy on folks abroad:

Mass Surveillance by the US Intelligence Agencies

Here is a greatly disturbing post (sounds like the stuff my schizophrenic cousin would say when he wasn’t on his meds) that summarizes a portion of Project PM Wiki. Smith describes a mass intelligence surveillance program with no government oversight that is funded by the US government and operated by federal agencies and US companies called Romas/COIN. According to Smith, Aaron Barr had a leadership role in the putting together the team of companies that bid on this contract. (Remember Barr? He resigned from his own firm after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.)

Ms Smith describes a sophisticated mass surveillance campaign called Romas/COIN- soon to be replaced by a similar program known as Odyssey. For two years, the U.S. has been conducting mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world. What is interesting is that despite listening into phone calls, monitoring activities of individuals, and reading emails the Intelligence community was surprised by all the uprisings in the Arab world. Hmm, they really know how to use this stuff.

Most importantly Smith notes that this program was headed up by agencies, individuals and corporations who seem to have no government oversight-despite US taxpayer funding- while having carte blanche to monitoring the public.