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."