Total Information Awareness

It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program! The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable. What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?

The Department of Justice has released a report detailing its use of multiple databases and information provided by data brokers to identify identity thieves and patterns of fraud, as well as its plans to build a new database to hunt terrorists.