The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a branch of the Department of Defense that works on military research. TIA's goal is to collect as much information as possible about as many people as possible into an "ultra-large-scale" database. TIA might incorporate government records of all kinds, individual medical and financial records, political beliefs, travel history, prescriptions, buying habits, communications (phone calls, e-mails and Web surfing), school records, personal and family associations, and more. The government will then use data mining techniques to try to identify terrorists and terrorist activities.

TIA is an enormous threat to our privacy, our Constitution, and our freedom. The keepers of the TIA database would gain a tremendous amount of power over American citizens. Inevitably, some of them will abuse that power. TIA flies in the face of the American tradition that the police conduct surveillance only where there is evidence of involvement in wrongdoing. The TIA needs to be stopped.