We've been saying for months not to get too happy over the supposed "death" of Total Information Awareness. Now, Defense Tech Pal Mike Sniffen reports that when Congress moved to defund TIA, it "quietly agreed to continue paying to develop highly specialized software to gather foreign intelligence on terrorists."

In a classified section summarized publicly, Congress added money for this software research to the "National Foreign Intelligence Program," without identifying openly which intelligence agency would do the work.

It said, for the time being, products of this research could only be used overseas or against non-U.S. citizens in this country, not against Americans on U.S. soil.

Congressional officials would not say which Poindexter programs were killed and which were transferred. People with direct knowledge of the contracts told the AP that the surviving programs included some of 18 data-mining projects known in Poindexter's research as Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery.

THERE'S MORE: Phil Carter has a nice analysis of the risks of TIA-like efforts.