But in early November, articles in the New York Times and Washington Post reported on a new effort by John Poindexter, of Iran-contra notoriety, to launch a "Total Information Awareness" computer program for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The two articles described a global intelligence project, intended for domestic as well as international use, uniting data-mining techniques with the packet analysis tools developed under auspices of the Communication Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (Calea).

Let's be clear about what this new initiative entails. No massive, centralized computer is being discussed, nor is there a new agency dedicated to gathering new types of intelligence or collating information from existing FBI, NSA or NRO platforms.

What Poindexter wants to do is take the data-mining tools familiar in the "one-to-one marketing" commercial world, and use them to create templates of intelligence information to identify suspicious behavior. Since many of these tools were based on database platforms originally developed for the NSA, it's easy to reassign them to an expanded intelligence domain. Poindexter also is looking at making information appliances of all types more aware of data and voice flows being sent, and to be capable of reporting certain statistics to network nodes in public Internet and telephony networks.

The technology for this, developed under Calea, is being inserted into telco central offices and points-of-presence worldwide. NSA already uses this technology globally, since the Supreme Court recognizes no civil liberties applying to foreigners. All it will take to put Calea-enabled equipment to broader use at home is a few amendments to the Homeland Security Act. We should be hyperaware of the dual meaning of technical terms like "deep packet analysis" or "stateful inspection." And as the Department of Homeland Security legislation moves through Congress this month, we should be afraid, very afraid.