"A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency's secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases," the *New York Times *is reporting. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate.
True, true. But it's probably important to reiterate, at this point, that the NSA took over most of the notorious Total Information Awareness data-mining program in 2003. And that TIA-esque "predictive" information-scrubbing techniques were almost certainly used to build profiles for the NSA's warrantless surveillance efforts.
