Rejected surveillance programs were quietly reassigned and funded under other names.

Evidence

Surveillance exceptionalism thrived in that hyperactivity. Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program did not obtain congressional support, but an analysis in the MIT Technology Review showed that many of the TIA initiatives were quietly reassigned to the Pentagon’s Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), which in 2002 received 64 million to fund a research program in “novel intelligence from massive data.” In 2004 the US General Accounting Office surveyed 199 data-mining projects across dozens of federal agencies and more than 120 programs developed to collect and analyze personal data to predict individual behavior. The New York Times reported in 2006 that the intelligence agencies, backed by a 40 billion annual budget, regularly fielded secretive shopping expeditions to Silicon Valley in search of new data-mining and analysis technologies. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 374

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘creeping normalcy’ and incremental drift mechanisms the book may develop later — TIA’s reassignment is a concrete case of policy defeat not ending the program.
• QUESTION: Would be worth tracing whether In-Q-Tel or ARDA’s ‘novel intelligence from massive data’ directly funded any early Google or big-data firm that later shaped the commercial analytics market.