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Posted on 07/17/2003 7:59:21 PM PDT by Brian S
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday to cut off funding for a widely criticized computer-surveillance program that would comb travel records, credit-card bills and other private records to sniff out suspected terrorists.
In a military spending bill it passed unanimously, the Senate forbade the Defense Department to spend any portion of its $369 billion budget on the Terrorism Information Awareness program, brushing aside a request by the Bush administration to keep development efforts intact.
"No funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Defense .... may be obligated or expended on research and development on the Terrorism Information Awareness program," the bill said.
The fate of the $54 million program will likely be determined in negotiations with the House of Representatives, which forbade the Pentagon from using the program on U.S. citizens without permission but did not cut off funding when it approved its version of the Pentagon's budget earlier this month.
Known until recently as Total Information Awareness, the surveillance effort would use cutting-edge "data mining" technology to unearth suspicious patterns from a wide array of public and private records.
Civil-liberties advocates have criticized TIA since it was made public last fall, saying it could lead to an Orwellian surveillance state in which citizens have no privacy.
The Pentagon said in a report to Congress in May that TIA would be set up in a way to prevent investigators from indiscriminately rummaging through personal records, but said it had not yet established specific safeguards.
The Bush administration urged the Senate to preserve funding for the program in a statement released on Monday.
"This provision would deny an important tool in the war on terrorism," the administration said.
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