The San Francisco Chronicle has some warnings about the newly renamed Terrorism Information Awareness project:

THE PENTAGON'S plan to mine countless governmental and commercial databases is no less worrisome than it was earlier, after a soothing report to Congress and a name change for better public relations. The Defense Department's "Total Information Awareness" program has been rechristened "Terrorism Information Awareness," to offset the impression that the brainchild of former Adm. John Poindexter would compile electronic dossiers on all Americans. The Department of Defense describes it, rather, as an effort "to protect U.S. citizens by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats before an attack." "

....The Pentagon's high-tech research now would collect untold trillions of additional "dots" from all kinds of records and transactions, plus far-out data like the shapes of faces and the way people walk (gait analysis), to provide more anti-terrorist tools.

....Civil libertarians are concerned, with good reason, about whether this can be done without intruding on the privacy and other rights of all of us whose everyday lives will be under surveillance. That is why Congress blocked further spending on the system pending a further report from the Pentagon (submitted May 20) on safeguards for innocent citizens. The Department of Defense has an "oversight board" to assess "privacy and civil liberties impacts," and assures us of its "commitment to the rule of law."

All well and good. But Congress should continue to keep Poindexter and his electronic spy team on a short leash as they use our dental records and pedestrian patterns in their search for terrorists.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, dedicated to preserving our privacy rights in the digital world, has this analysis of the DARPA report on the Total Information Awareness Project. The actual report is available here.