[extropy-chat] Bush's Schedule for NASA

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004, Harvey Newstrom wrote:

> The entire homeland defense department was a way for Bush to cancel programs
> he didn't like and fund programs he did like, without involving congress.
> It was an executive decision.  I think they just co-opted NASA's budget to
> fund more homeland defense stuff.

I'm not so sure about this Harvey.  If I recall there was a big debate
about which departments to merge into Homeland Security (to be expected
given turf wars).  I don't know how this ended up but I'm reasonably sure
that Congress had to authorize budgets in any case.  So the only way
to make this case would be a detailed analysis of budgets of individual
departments pre H.S. and post H.S.

Now, I'm reasonably certain that NASA investigators do apply for grants
from other government agencies (NSF, etc.) as well as other funding
sources.  The mix of public and private funds on any specific project
may be difficult to determine unless one requests an FOI disclosure
for approved grant applications and internal budgets.

Now, I suspect what may have happened is (a) someone within NASA saw
an opportunity to make a job for themselves in the Dept. of H.S. and
went for it; or (b) someone within the Dept. of H.S. saw an opportunity
to use NASA resources and perhaps "cover" to avoid public awareness.

Obviously to do the type of massive data mining discussed in matching
airline passenger records with private databases and pattern searching
within those requires some heavy duty computational capacity.  Now
there is obviously a lot of this capacity at certain sites around
Washington D.C. but the agencies responsible for this capacity
would immediately come under scrutiny by watchdog organizations
if they requested such information.

NASA Ames is one of the few sites with the supercomputer capacity
to deal with such a large amount of information (I've seen the
computers) which is somewhat secure yet would not immediately
trigger red flags.  A more interesting question might be *how*
precisely was terabytes(?) of information moved from the airline
computers to the government computers for data mining???  And then
of course you can ask whether it stayed on only NASA computers?

You could have an FOI act fun-festival with this story and related
efforts to implement CAPPS II.

Robert