As reported by The Register:
“The Bush Administration plans to extend its mighty neural networks to international banking in hopes of discovering terrorist activity. The scheme would allow the US Treasury Department to maintain databases of international money transfers to and from the USA. The result of this additional data mining will be a flood of largely irrelevant data to federal agencies already awash in irrelevant data. But the Administration’s overall approach has been to get all the data it can now, and figure out how it might be used to catch terrorists later.
“Since the Administration’s grand schemes for monitoring the public’s every move, such as the MATRIX and Total Information Awareness (TIA), fell into disrepute, it appears to be taking a piecemeal approach, building its surveillance society one step at a time. The government hopes that the public will perceive them as discrete elements in the so-called war on terror, and not contemplate the eventual, cumulative effect of all this activity.”
Sigh.