PRIVACY advocates were among those celebrating the departure this month of the holder of an obscure government office, John Poindexter.
A retired admiral, Poindexter was appointed by President Bush as a senior policy maker at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the best-known scientific arm of the Department of Defense. There he created the Total Information Awareness Program, which among much else sought to consolidate government databases and develop software to search them more efficiently. It seemed sensible, except for the worry that the government already knows too much. Would the next step be a security camera in your…
