Man, wouldn't it be sweet if the government created an enormous database that tracked everything each and every American did? And I mean everything! Information on every credit card transaction, bank activity, movie rental, airplane-ticket purchase, Olive Garden "Never-Ending Pasta Bowl" purchase, academic record, Penthouse magazine subscription -- it would all go into a database to be "data mined" for suspicious terrorist activity. Boy howdy, that'd be sweet!

Wait, that wouldn't be sweet at all. That'd quite possibly be the opposite of sweet. What's that word I'm looking for? Oh yeah: horrible. That would be horrible.

Well something horrible's happenin' here, because plans are underway at the Pentagon to construct just such a database. Led by Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, plans are afoot for a program called "Total Information Awareness" (TIA).

Poindexter, working through the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, hopes to combine the U.S. government's already extensive information collected on its citizens, information ranging from place of birth to any FBI info, with all financial and monetary transaction information as collected by consumer agencies.

In other words, the government would know every time you went to eBay and paid $6.99 for the Precious Moments "Love is the Key" Figurine or paid $19.99 for a baseball signed by Ron Jeremy.

Naturally, Poindexter's lab puts a positive spin on this snooping. Says the admiral, "We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge and create actionable options." Once the data are "mined," it's Poindexter's hope that patterns will emerge from the billions of transactions of the American populace, and the government will be able to track down and capture the elusive terrorists in our midst.

Never mind the fact that if TIA were to go into effect, any terrorist with a grain of sense would start covering his tracks like a heroin junkie at a high school reunion, evading detection against the white noise of a billion credit-card purchases and leaving the unassuming U.S. citizen as the object of the snooping.

And not to suggest that the government would use racial profiling in their analysis of the data, but -- OK, yeah, there'd likely be extreme and constant racial profiling.

If TIA comes alive, privacy would become extinct. We would see the emergence of what could be referred to only as a "surveillance state," where the only privacy one would have is in one's own thoughts.

This may sound like paranoia. This may sound like conspiracy talk. This may sound like that book, 1985, and its all-seeing "Huge Brother" (Could someone fact check this sentence? Thanks.)

But this is true; this is happening.

In October 2001, I wrote about the danger of our writing a "blank check" for our government to fight terrorism. Well, the blank check has been written, and Bush has given it to Poindexter for cashing.

For most college students, John M. Poindexter's name likely does not ring a bell. He is, however, one of the mastermind's behind President Reagan's Iran-Contra affair, where missiles were sold to the Iranians and the money made was siphoned to Nicaraguan guerrillas.

In 1990, Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress about his role in the affair. Although, in 1991, his conviction was overturned on a technicality, the man who said under oath that it was his "duty" to lie to the American people will now be in charge of gathering minute information on every one of us.

Poindexter claims that since credit- card companies and marketing companies gather information on us all of the time, the government should be able to as well. Not to sound like my fifth-grade librarian, but Mr. Poindexter, if all of the credit card companies and marketing companies went jumping off a bridge, would you do it as well?

Here's a novel idea. Instead of the Bush administration following the super corporations' lead by profiling and cataloguing all of our actions, maybe the administration should work to keep the corporations from gathering such massive and thorough databases on us in the first place. Maybe Bush and friends should affirm the right to privacy as a key civil liberty, central to democracy.

For an administration that talks an awful lot about the evils of "big government," this desire to give the United States government its biggest increase in scope and power since the solidification of a standing army seems a bit suspect. And even if the Bush administration's plans for TIA are not nefarious, once this system is in place there's no telling what it could be used for in the future.

Twenty-first century witch hunts and McCarthyism will become quite interesting with Total Information Awareness running loose.

We cannot allow Poindexter and his fellow snoops to cleave the very concept of privacy from our American lives.

TIA would create a system of government where every citizen would become one of the "usual suspects." Privacy would be deemed an un-American activity.

And everyone will know about that "specialty video" you bought from Amazon.com the other day.