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July 18, 2003. The US Senate voted on July 17 to cut off funding for TIA. 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.

Here is Washington Post story.

In related news, Wired News (July 29) reports that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced a new bill that would require the Pentagon, the CIA and the Treasury and Homeland Security departments to report to Congress about their use of commercial databases to track down terrorists, fugitives and deadbeat dads.

The Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act, which was drafted in conjunction with a bipartisan coalition of privacy groups, would cut off funding for agencies' use of commercial databases unless they file a report in 60 days about the extent to which they use these databases or the databases of other federal agencies.

According to Wired, "If the bill passes, no government employee or computer could sift through federal or commercial databases to search for individuals who fit a profile."

The bill is still in a very early stage.

However, the overall message is that data mining is a technology whose use should be highly restricted or banned.

Here is the Wired story.

Here is Senator Wyden page and the text of the proposed bill