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Nov 14, 2002. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), began awarding contracts this month for development of a prototype "Total Information Awareness" system --

The program website (www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm) says:

The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists – and decipher their plans – and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts. To that end, the TIA program objective is to create a counter-terrorism information system that: (1) increases information coverage by an order of magnitude, and affords easy future scaling; (2) provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed; (3) can automatically queue analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks; and, (4) supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and prospective courses of action.

The director of the effort, John Poindexter, a former national security advisor, said that the system would use statistical techniques known as data mining to look for threatening patterns among everyday transactions.

Poindexter further argued that the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" separating commercial and government data bases.

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) told President Bush recently that the Pentagon should end research aimed at sifting through everything from credit card transactions to travel records for tip-offs to terrorist plots.

"If the Pentagon has its way, every American -- from the Nebraskan farmer to the Wall Street banker -- will find themselves under the accusatory cyber-state of an all-powerful national security apparatus," said Laura Murphy, director of the Washington national office.

In the first related contract, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. of Falls Church, Virginia, has been awarded $1.5 million worth of work on a planned $62.9 million contract, the Army said last week. Work under the contract is expected to be wrapped up by Nov. 7, 2007, the Army said.

Here is full story from Reuters and ABC News.