Senate Severely Restricts TIA

"The Senate voted today to bar deployment of a Pentagon project to search for terrorists by scanning information in Internet mail and in the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies here and abroad." [Scripting News]

It's not quite a total block, but most importently it shows the legislative branch has no intention of just letting the executive branch do whatever it feels like when it comes to surveillance. Checks and balances at work again. I have no doubt us civil libertatian types will still be unhappy with the final product, but we'll be much, much less unhappy then we would have been if TIA was started in its previously proposed form.

Which reminds me, I have an essay on why TIA wouldn't have worked I need to brush up and post. It's another essay on the "danger of false positives" scheme, but A: it does have a unique twist at the end and B: I really think we need to keep showing people over and over again how dangerous that is, until it penetrates the "common American's" conciousness. It never will, of course, but the closer we get, the better.