A PICTURE OF THE GLOBE, under the watchful gaze of that spooky pyramid on the dollar bill, the one with the all-seeing eye of God at the top. Underlining that, the project’s motto: SCIENTIA EST POTENTIA (Knowledge Is Power).
        All in all, not a bad description of the office’s lofty—and controversial—ambitions. Quietly created after the September 11 attacks, the office’s Total Information Awareness project aims to enable federal investigators to engage in a kind of super “data mining”—inventing software to trawl through commercial and government computer databases in search of suspicious patterns that might indicate terror plans.
        The 9-11 hijackers, for instance, enrolled in flight schools, rented apartments, used credit cards and bought airline tickets together. The details of all these transactions were routinely stored in various companies’ computers. The Feds argue that if they had had the ability to scan the computers that logged the terrorists’ movements and purchases, they might have been able to connect the dots between the men.
       
INTENSE SUSPICION
       Yet from the day the research program was launched at the start of the year, it has been the target of intense suspicion, from both right and left. In order to identify possibly conspiratorial behavior by a few individuals, the computers would have to sift through the personal information of millions of innocent people—without their knowledge or consent. Potentially, the government could keep track of what you buy, whom you call, where you travel—just by tapping into the files that various businesses already keep on you. Advocates insist safeguards will be built into any search system, but critics are not reassured. “Put the pieces together, and you could build a capability to track the city-to-city movements of any citizen,” says the ACLU’s Katie Corrigan.