The New York Times rips Admiral John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program in an editorial Monday titled A Snooper's Dream.

The program, invented by John Poindexter, a rear admiral with a less than sterling record, would create a huge national database of all our personal records, from banking to credit card purchases and more. Poindexter justifies the program as a national security enhancement. The Times nails it for what is is: an assault on civil liberties.

"Total Information Awareness (T.I.A.) aims to use the vast networking powers of the computer to "mine" huge amounts of information about people and thus help investigative agencies identify potential terrorists and anticipate terrorist activities. All the transactions of everyday life -- credit card purchases, travel and telephone records, even Internet traffic like e-mail -- would be grist for the electronic mill."

"To civil libertarians, T.I.A., with its Orwellian dossiers on each and every American, would constitute a huge invasion of privacy. Mr. Poindexter says he has no wish to trample on the Fourth Amendment, and that the technology can be designed so as to "preserve rights and protect people's privacy while helping to make us all safer." His associates say that his main role is to develop the technology, not the policy that governs its use."

"This strikes us as disingenuous. Mr. Poindexter is a policy man to the core. Besides, there are enough federal agencies already engaged in the "mining" of information about all of us. The last thing we need is a vast new system of domestic surveillance engineered by John Poindexter."

"Congress should shut down the program pending a thorough investigation. It could do this with an amendment denying further financing that could be attached to an appropriations bill or the homeland security bill now under discussion in the Senate. Either way, T.I.A. needs immediate oversight."

You can read what the military says about T.I.A. on its website here.

More to the point and far less obtuse is the ACLU's statement here.