"This could be the Perfect Storm for civil liberties in America. The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is DARPA and the agency is the FBI. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."

- Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in Washington

WHEN David Aufhauser, general counsel to the US Treasury, spoke to a local group late this summer, he spoke in purely theoretical terms of a grand database that tracked every citizen and all the relevant details of their lives. In conversation, he revealed that no such system was envisaged.

From The New York Times, last week, by John Markoff:

The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the world, including the United States.

Programme director Vice Adm. John Poindexter says the system would provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement with instant access to information from e-mail and calling records to credit card, banking transactions and travel records - without a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been allowed to spy on Americans without legal authorisation. But Poindexter, National Security Adviser in the Reagan administration, has said the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of electronic details of life in the United States.

Poindexter has said the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.

"We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge and create actionable options," he said in a speech in California earlier this year.

Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Office of Information Awareness, charged with developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

To deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.

The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worried civil liberties proponents.

Also from the New York Times, November 13, 2001:

You Are a Suspect, by columnist William Safire:

If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend - all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralised grand database".

To this computerised dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you - passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the FBI, your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance - and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every US citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to National Security Adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here", arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.

Even the hastily passed USA Patriot Act, which widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight.

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping". And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with the president.

This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow of the Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of Information Act.

Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness", the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.

The Latin motto over Poindexter's new Pentagon office reads "Scientia Est Potentia" - knowledge is power.

Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," this brilliant mind blandly assured the Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.