Okay, this isn't really fair--nailing a guy to the wall for being in charge of a stupid study,

Sorry, Tom, Poindexter's not just in charge of a study. He came up with the idea for TIA, sold it to his buddies at the Pentagon, and is in charge of an active project to implement Cyber Big Brother. He's out there proselytizing for it.

Here's a speech he gave at DARPA on TIA. It's clearly not just an academic exercize. They're not studying whether it's feasible, they're planning how to implement it. Poindexter's already convinced it's feasible, and I suspect he's right.

Note the emphasis on what he euphemistically calls the "transaction space". In civilian terms, that means your credit card and ATM records, mortgage paperwork (on file with Fannie Mae or FHA), credit reports, shipping records, checks you write, movies you rent...plus non-financial records such as Web sites you visit and email you send and receive...every last detail of your life in an electronic-transaction world.

Those things are already available electronically, of course. Poindexter's chilling "innovation" is a system to correlate the disparate details into a coherent picture of your life.

He's only sixteen years late...

--Robert