Sorry to dissagree but that sounds like a hell of a good idea. It would be the fastest way to shut down the terrorists, after all, we are in a war and we are on the front lines.
I don't like the idea in general and I would never trust Clinton with it but I think it's the fastest way to secure ourselves. I would also like to think that we are loaning the power to do this rather than giving the power and it would need close oversight.
With all due respect to your opinion, TIA could take one of two routes. It could use, as they claim, existing commercial lists of consumer data. But the best data modellers in the direct marketing industry do cartwheels if they get a one percent response rate to their mailings - on data gathered on American consumers, the vast majority of whom make no effort to disconnect their purchasing patterns and demographics from their identies. Since I work with this data for a living, I take a few simple steps to prevent the gathering of personal information - I pay with cash whenever possible and avoid giving out personal information. As a result, I hardly ever get telemarketing calls or junk mail. I am mostly off the radar screen of this kind of data and the systems that analyze it. It would be very simple for a terrorist to do the same, rendering him invisible to TIA.
To do what Poindexter envisions, TIA would require that every business in America collect the indentity of every consumer in America at the point of sale, and transmit that information along with every item purchases to a central repository. This would require a complete overhaul of every POS system in the country, along with a massive data transmission project, with costs that you can probably envision. This, quite frankly, will not happen. So one version of TIA is worthless, and the other one unfeasible. But TIA could become a handy-dandy lookup database, especially for political opponents.