Via Noah at Defense Tech: This summer, an influential group of Pentagon advisers, the Defense Science Board, submitted a report to Rumsfeld recommending massive spying on the level of "The Manhattan Project" to win the war on terror:

The Pentagon urgently needs a massive effort to develop tools to track individuals, items and activities in ways that exist today only in science fiction...Technologies that can identify people by unique physical characteristics — fingerprint, voice, odor, gait or even pattern of iris — must be merged with new means of “tagging” so that U.S. forces can find enemies who escape into a crowd or slip into a labyrinthine slum.

A Defense Science Board study this summer, “Transition to and From Hostilities,” calls for a new array of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

“The global war on terrorism cannot be won without a ‘Manhattan Project’-like TTL [tagging, tracking, and locating] program,” said briefing charts summarizing some of the study’s findings. The Manhattan Project was a top-secret U.S. military-led effort involving many civilian scientists during World War II to develop the atomic bomb.

Noah responds,