June 25 is the 100th anniversary of George Orwell's birth and as the author of "1984" he would probably have laughed (if alive) at the ways in which the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 have been used by governments to justify the increasing surveillance of their citizens.

In 1984, Orwell described a totalitarian society in which the government had almost complete control over the people.

The supreme ruler was Big Brother, who could address all people at will through telescreens, which could not be turned off.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.

Technology knows no ideology and so it is particularly worrisome that democratic governments are using breakthroughs in surveillance systems to beef up that surveillance. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bermuda's neighbour, where the Bush administration has promoted tougher surveillance measures as a panacea for the public's fear of terrorism.

A big example is the task given to the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop completely new detection systems for tracking citizens.

The initiative has been around for a few years under the name "Total Information Awareness" programme.

Concerned about some of the plans DARPA had for the proposed technology Congress suspended funding for the programme in February and demanded a report on how the department planned to protect individual privacy.

When DARPA reported to Congress last month, the name of the programme had been conveniently been changed to the "Terrorist Information Awareness" programme. "Name Changed. Problem Solved," the Electronic Privacy Information Centre said in a wry aside. How Big Brother can you get? Well there's more.

The programme's aim is to develop technology that would allow investigators to sift through the financial, telephone, travel and medical records of millions of people in hopes of identifying terrorists before they strike.

A giant database would link together such privately held data as credit card records, bank transactions, car rental receipts and gun purchases, with the intelligence information already gathered by the federal government.

TIA documents indicate that the task is beyond current technology and that the Pentagon is primarily interested in advances in science, technology or systems and the "total reinvention of technologies for storing and accessing information ... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes."

While no one would be opposed to the development of new and exciting technology as described in the anodyne terms by the defence department, privacy concerns arise in how the database will be used.

Many fear, and probably rightly, that a database aimed at tracking terrorists, will eventually be used for all sorts of other purposes, whether to ferret out other types of criminals, or to prevent perfectly legitimate activities, such as civil protest.

The Cato Institute has even put numbers to the problem.

The conservative think-tank says the core of the renamed programme is the same as the old - to create a database of public and private records to be analysed for patterns indicative of terrorist activities. TIA essentially depends on the "law of large numbers" in which profiles are developed of people who could be terrorists. Like commercial data mining of databases, only a small fraction of the pool of people who fit the profile of a terrorist will, in fact, be actual terrorists.

Here's the frightening calculation: "Assume a population of 240 million adults (i.e., children are not would-be terrorist candidates). Assume there are 5,000 terrorists lurking among us. Assume a 99.9 percent probability (i.e., near perfect and very highly unlikely) of correctly identifying a suspect as an actual terrorist - that is, if you suspect someone is a terrorist, he is actually a terrorist.

And assume a 99.9 percent probability (again, highly unlikely) of correctly identifying a suspect as an innocent person."

What's the probability of finding a terrorist hiding among the masses?

Cato forecasts that using such probabilities this means that about 244,299 people will be identified by the system as suspected terrorists.

About 239,995 innocent people will be mis-identified as terrorists. The probability of finding a real terrorist is two percent.

If the total pool of potential terrorists is reduced to just the US Muslim population, or about six million people and accuracy is reduced to 95 percent almost 304,500 people will be identified as suspected terrorists and 299,750 innocent people will be mis-identified as terrorists.

The probability of finding a real terrorist would be 1.5 percent.

"The inescapable conclusion is that TIA, if broadly applied, is simply a fishing expedition that casts a wide net, snaring many to catch very few," the think-tank concludes.

For too many people in power the arrest of innocent people would be acceptable as "collateral damage".

So it is up to us, whether we live in the US, Bermuda or France, to protest loudly when we see signs of more and more unjustified intrusion into our lives.

Either that or we will have to learn to live, in the words of Orwell, "from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised".

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Tech Tattle deals with issues in technology. Contact Ahmed at editoroffshoreon.com