One of those things that I have been crying about how evil it is for a while is getting shut down by Congress. It’s that Pentagon DARPA research initiative, the Terrorism Information Awareness program. This is that pure evil thing run by the “Information Awareness Office” which was seeking to be able to combine and instantly analyze trends and patterns in your travel, credit, medical and other records. Ostensibly to see if you’re a terrorist or not, but I’m sure it would have (and still will) gotten pushed into the private sector, to track you for unpaid bills and shit like that.

But anyway, its a pretty nice victory to see them shut down. On a related note, Congress also put the breaks on CAPPS II, which is the new airline passenger-profiling system, until they can set up an independent review of its privacy implications and effectiveness. Hooray!

Now if we could only stop the PATRIOT ACT II, and RFID chips, and get Bush out of office, and withdraw troops from around the world, we’d have it all. Well, at least a start anyway.