Many post-9/11 programs such as Stellar Wind and Prism have only come to public and policymaker attention thanks to the efforts of whistleblowers such as Snowden or Mark Klein.

Read more in our report: watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/pap…

Congress cut funding for the program in 2003, but the funding migrated to a defense “black budget,” and TIA was shifted to the NSA. It became the precursor to Prism, the infamous surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013. [3/4]

TIA aimed to compile a mass array of commercial, medical, financial, travel, education, communications, and government information about U.S. citizens and noncitizens in a single database that could be searched warrantlessly, on the grounds of counterterrorism. [2/4]

Total Information Awareness, an Orwellian mass surveillance program, was initially drafted the day of the 9/11 attacks by John Poindexter, who was convicted of five felony charges on April 7, 1990 for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. [1/4] watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/pap…

Between 2021 and 2023, the U.S. government conducted counterterrorism operations in 78 countries. They include ground combat in at least nine countries and air strikes in at least four countries during the first three years of the Biden Administration.  watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/pap…

Reminder: Defense spending has never moved in tandem with inflation, instead rising steadily to new heights in recent years. watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/pap…

A trillion-dollar Pentagon budget would come at the expense of efforts to mitigate climate change, epidemics of disease, economic inequality, and other issues that threaten our lives and safety, writes Julia Gledhill and William Hartung. tomdispatch.com/spending-unlim…

Decades of high military spending have strengthened America’s ability to fight wars, but weakened its capacities in other core functions such as infrastructure, healthcare and education. watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/pap…