Born again: where government's unpopular programs go to live.

• Author: Benson, Josh
• Position: 10 Miles Square

When officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--the Pentagon office that helped invent everything from the stealth bomber to the Internet--launched a "data mining" project to uncover terrorist plots, it was bound to cause consternation. It wasn't just the program's ominous name (Total Information Awareness), menacing logo (an all-seeing Mason--ic eye), or disreputable director (Iran--Contra conspirator John Poindexter). The proposed system would tap into commercial and government databases across the country, download every bit of personal information stored--credit card statements, medical records, travel plans, phone bills, grocery receipts--then scan through it all in search of "suspicious" activity. Designed to catch, say, someone flying from the Middle East to the Midwest and then buying a lot of fertilizer, it might finger a farmer vacationing in Jerusalem as easily as it did a terrorist building a truck bomb. Worse, the planned system would have virtually no oversight, no safeguards, and no privacy guidelines to protect the people being snooped on.

"There was no balance," recalls James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a wonkish Internet policy shop that aims to preserve civil liberties in the digital age. "There were no rules." When the TIA story broke in November 2002, Dempsey mobilized a left-right coalition of libertarian organizations and politicians who had been loose allies for years. Many supported data mining in principle, but felt the unprecedented government surveillance of TIA demanded congressional oversight, and they quickly succeeded in convincing others.

By February of last year, Congress had passed legislation reining in TIA. The administration, desperate to save the program, went into "high damage control," notes Dempsey. Pentagon officials formed showy "privacy advisory councils," testified before Congress extensively, changed the name of the program (to the more innocuous "Terrorism Information Awareness), and even fired Poindexter--but none of it ended the controversy. "No one wanted to defend what the Bush administration was doing," Dempsey says. Last fall, Congress voted to close down the program for good; a House Senate conference committee declared TIA "terminated." Privacy activists cheered, as did most Democrats and many Republicans. The New York Times announced, simply, "Surveillance...