NSA watch: Bride of "Total Information Awareness"

In today's New York Times, there was an article about the an open session of the Senate Intelligence committee held on 2 February, 2006. Among many contentious exchanges, here's one that caught my eye:

A similarly revealing sparring session came when Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, pressed the intelligence officials about whether a controversial Pentagon data-mining program called Total Information Awareness had been effectively transferred to the intelligence agencies after being shut down by Congress.

Mr. Negroponte and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, both said they did not know. Then came the turn of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who headed N.S.A. for six years before becoming the principal deputy director of national intelligence last spring.

"Senator," General Hayden said, "I'd like to answer in closed session."

Bingo - that's a yes in my book. There's no reason you'd need to restrict your answer to closed session if it was an unqualified no. What this means is that Total Information Awareness (see Wikipedia entry here) was clandestinely reconstituted.