Under the U.S. Homeland Security Act (our rights again given away freely by a bipartisan Congress), 22 U.S. agencies are combined in order to achieve "total information awareness" on every American citizen. The government will soon be amassing a file on every American that includes every magazine subscription, credit card purchase, Web site visit, medical record, library record, bank deposit or withdrawals, every airline purchase, as well as judicial, divorce records, and so on. This will be recorded in a central data base, not by a publicly accountable authority, but by the Pentagon, which already operates in total secrecy from the American public. I see the good professor is letting William Safire do his research instead of verifying this himself. The HSA had NOTHING to do with TIA, and TIA is only at the concept stage, and will probably be either curtailed or killed, just as HSA killed TIPS (gee, the professor didn't mention THAT - just goes to show that sensationism is favored over rational analysis of the facts).