From Declan McCullagh's weekly column on News.com:
Now a Defense Department agency is devising a way to link these
different systems together to create a kind of digital alter ego of
each of us. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, this proposed
centralization was inevitable–and it's only going to get worse.Blame retired Admiral John Poindexter, national security adviser for
former President Ronald Reagan, who returned to the Pentagon in
February to run a creepy new agency that's trying to create this
mammoth surveillance and information-analysis system. It's called
Total Information Awareness, and it's funded by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA).Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's a good idea, or that it's
consistent with the traditional American values of limited government
and a sharp demarcation between the private and the public sector. I'm
not even sure if Poindexter's brainchild could ever work.What I am saying is that if our personal information–some of it
extraordinarily sensitive–is archived in corporate or government
databases and protected only by the weak shield of the law, it's
vulnerable to federal snoops.[…]
Technology offers a better way to preserve our rights against
government overreaching. New crises may prompt Congress to vote
unanimously to skewer the Bill of Rights. But technological
protections don't vary with the whims of politicians or shifts in
Supreme Court majorities.The sad thing is that for years we've known about technology that can
slow down this mass "databasification" of American society. We just
haven't used it.