The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

Often overlooked amid the controversy over the legality of the Bush administration's eavesdropping without warrants is a huge increase in recent years in the number of wiretaps conducted with court approval. Smaller telecom companies in particular have sought help from outsiders in order to comply with the court-ordered subpoenas, touching off a scramble among third parties to meet the demand for assistance.

Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said.

Noah Shachtman details the Pentagon's plans
for a surveillance system that can track every vehicle within an urban combat zone and examines the possibilities that the same system could be used for domestic surveillance.

A group at MIT has launched a new site, "Government Information Awareness", devoted to "reverse" surveillance of government agencies and the people involved.

The Pentagon is developing a surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyse the movement of every vehicle in a city. But police, scientists and privacy experts all agree that the technology, which is neither classified nor legally limited to military use, could easily be adapted for domestic law enforcement and surveillance.

A surveillance camera that can track and analyze the movement of individual vehicles in a crowded city is being developed for the Pentagon. Despite assurances that the camera is meant only to protect troops in the field, civilian authorities will probably want to use it, too.

The U.S. government has begun a massive data-mining research program, called Total Information Awareness (TIA), that would comb through vast amounts of information--purchase records, E-mail and phone logs, travel arrangements--that people generate in their daily lives, looking for telltale patterns of terrorist activity. One data mining expert noted that the goals of the project -- spotting suspicious patterns across multiple databases while minimizing false alarms and safeguarding individual privacy -- are on a similar scale to "putting a man on the moon."

The author defends the controversial U.S. Total Information Awareness program against the "hysterical luddites" who fought to have it banned.