The valley has long indulged its own antiestablishment mythology -- rebellious, libertarian hackers in their parents' garages, bucking the system by inventing world-changing, personally empowering technologies -- and Louie was worried that persuading programmers to collaborate with the C.I.A. would be ''borderline ludicrous.'' Despite his doubts, Louie agreed to open one In-Q-Tel office in Menlo Park, Calif., and another near Washington. He quickly discovered that far from recoiling at the idea of working with the C.I.A., Internet entrepreneurs flocked to his door. The chance to play with the government's cool toys trumped their fears of Big Brother.

[ ... ]

Our system ''will check your associates,'' Brett Ogilvie of Accenture told Business Week. ''It will ask if you have made international phone calls to Afghanistan, taken flying lessons or purchased 1,000 pounds of fertilizer.'' The only problem: in order for the system to obtain answers to those questions, the nation's privacy laws will need to be relaxed. Federal laws currently restrict the personally identifiable information that the government can demand from credit-card and phone companies except as part of a specific investigation.

[ ... ]

Lawrence Lessig, who teaches law at Stanford and is the nation's leading authority on the law and architecture of cyberspace, argues that the Accenture system is unworkable. ''I can understand these massive data systems to deal with things like stealing from the government or not paying your taxes -- systematic repetitive large-scale deviations from the law,'' he says. ''The problem I really have with the terrorism stuff is, do we have any good reason to believe we could ever predict this type of behavior?'' Because the sample of known terrorists is so small, Lessig says, the profiles are bound to be inaccurate.

The entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are undaunted by questions about whether it makes sense to profile terrorists the way they profile e-business consumers; they haven't been so enthusiastic about a race to innovate since the height of the dot-com bubble. In the glory days of the late 90's, Silicon Valley was consumed by the search for the ''killer app,'' the software application that was just so cool and effective that everyone had to buy it. After Sept. 11, the consensus in the valley is that the national-security ''killer app'' will allow government agencies to access and share information about Americans that is currently stored in different databases -- from your chat-room gossip to your shopping history to your parking tickets, and perhaps even the payment history for your child-support checks.

[ ... ]

The prospect of every hospital in America reporting your medical condition to a central Oracle database might cause some patients alarm. (Oracle insists that the information can be stored in ways that can't be linked to individual patients.) The same potential for invasions of privacy is raised by Larry Ellison's proposal to centralize all of the separate criminal databases run by federal and state authorities into a single national database. After we filed back into the conference room, David Carey explained that Oracle is already discussing with various federal agencies methods of sharing information that are currently restricted by law.

''We think of it as a triangle,'' said Tim Hoechst, a senior vice president for technology at Oracle, holding up a Dorito. ''At one corner is privacy, at one corner is assurance of security -- how safe is the data -- and at another corner is usability. It's all a matter of trade-offs. What we focus on is making the Dorito here, and putting you in any corner that you feel comfortable with. On Sept. 12, most Americans would say, Privacy out the window; go catch the folks. So we would have moved it all the way to usability. But maybe day to day, we move it a little bit more toward security.''

As the databases are consolidated, I asked, who should decide the proper balance between privacy and access? How do you avoid a situation in which someone could be kept off a plane because he had skipped jury duty or had an overdue parking ticket? A hush fell over the room, and people looked awkwardly at their sandwiches.

Finally Hoechst spoke up. ''You'll notice that we all became suspiciously quiet when we started talking about policy questions,'' he said. ''At Oracle, we leave that to our customers to decide. We become a little stymied when we start talking about the 'should wes' and the 'whys' and the 'hows,' because it's not our expertise.''

The Tom Lehrer song about the Nazi rocket scientist who defected to America popped into my head: ''Once ze rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun.''

[ ... ]

There are, at the moment, legal restrictions prohibiting the sharing of data by government agencies. The most important restriction was passed in 1974, to prevent President Nixon from ordering dragnet surveillance of Vietnam protesters and searching for their youthful marijuana arrests. I asked Ellison whether these legal restrictions should be relaxed. ''Oh, absolutely,'' he said. ''I mean absolutely. The prohibitions are absurd. It's this fear of an all-too-powerful government rising up and snatching away our liberties.'' Since Sept. 11, Ellison argued, those qualms no longer make any sense: ''It's our lives that are at risk, not our liberties,'' he said.

[ ... ]

''Depending on how these technologies are designed, they can respect traditional values of liberty or not,'' says Lawrence Lessig, ''and whether they do depends on the values that drive the designers and the institutions we build to check the design.'' Although Lessig's path-breaking book ''Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'' argues that it's possible to design technologies that protect privacy and security at the same time, he has become pessimistic that Silicon Valley, left to its own devices, will get the balance right. ''The reality is that all the market power is going to be on the side of delivering the security, and there's no strong claim on the other side for delivering the privacy,'' he says. ''There's no court that will stand up and push the demand for heightened review for privacy, and there's no politician. And then you have Larry Ellison types riding in with the glow of the market. He's like a rich version of a North Korean dictator.''

[ ... ]

In the face of Congressional indifference and judicial passivity, it has fallen to the technologists to sort out the appropriate balance between liberty and security. But this is a challenge that the technologists are ill equipped -- by culture and temperament -- to meet.

[ ... ]

The technology for integrated databases already exists, waiting to be activated by the flip of a switch. In the wake of Sept. 11, few politicians or judges seem willing to keep the forces of centralization in check. And no one should count on the technologists to police themselves.

I had one last question for Larry Ellison. ''In 20 years, do you think the global database is going to exist, and will it be run by Oracle?'' I asked.

Jeffrey Rosen is an associate professor at George Washington University Law School and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. His last article for The Times Magazine was about the growth of surveillance.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Silicon Valley vs. Your Privacy.

The story goes into great detail with Larry Ellison, who is still pushing hard to bring 'Big Brother' to life. When asked if this database will be created, and run on Oracle, Larry's response was 'I do think it will exist, and I think it is going to be an Oracle database. ...And we're going to track everything.'

Yahoo News - U.S. telcos must offer surveillance by June -FCC.

U.S. telephone companies, including mobile phone carriers, will have to provide law enforcement officials with some new surveillance capabilities by June 30, the Federal Communications Commission said on Thursday.

Carriers will have to provide upon request from law enforcement agencies the numbers dialed after a call is connected, numbers and associated signals of various parties who join a conference call or drop from one; call forwarding and call waiting signals; and signals related to obtaining messages left for a caller.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia vacated those so-called punch-list requirements in 2000 because it said the FCC failed to address adequately privacy and cost concerns raised by carriers and privacy advocates.

The FCC issued a 57-page order upholding the four challenged capabilities and found that their implementation was cost-effective and would minimize costs on residential customers.

Slashdot | FCC Reinstates CALEA Surveillance Capabilities.

The open question was, with many new digital phone services becoming available, what information would be obtainable with the (non-refusable) pen register or trap and trace-type order, and what would require a real search warrant where a judge is supposed to exercise his discretion in deciding whether to grant it or not? That is, in what cases would "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." be applied, and in what cases would the government be allowed to simply take the information without meeting those requirements?

Eventually the FCC released its interpretation of what the phone companies should do to implement CALEA. The FCC required several things that were "new" and expanded law enforcement's surveillance abilities. One requirement was that all the digits you dial after the call is put through be recorded and provided. So if you dial your bank to transfer funds to checking, or dial your voicemail to retrieve it, or send a message to someone's pager, your bank account number and PIN, your voicemail password, whatever you sent to the pager - all that can be retrieved without a search warrant by any law enforcement official. The FCC also required that if you were using a cell phone, that your physical location be provided as well. They required that if more than two people were on the line, complete information about who joined or dropped out of the conference call be made available. Similarly, data about call waiting or call forwarding was to be provided if these were used. And finally, if you were using VOIP, the government could get all the headers of all your packets sent during the call.

Cue the lawsuits. Civil liberties groups were concerned that the rules were too broad, the FBI was happy (the FCC had given them all they could want), and the telephone companies were concerned that the changes would be too expensive. The civil liberties groups and the telecom industry filed suits to force the FCC to revise its order.