Congress may have driven a stake through Total Information Awareness. But there are lots of other government data-mining programs -- eeriely similar to TIA -- that are still very much alive.

One TIA-like project is Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD), an initiative of the little-known Intelligence Community Advanced Research and Development Activity, notes secrecy guru Steven Aftergood, with the Federation of American Scientists.

"Pursued with a minimal public profile and lacking a polarizing figure like Adm. Poindexter to galvanize opposition, NIMD has proceeded quietly even as TIA imploded," Aftergood writes.

The NIMD effort aims to comb through "structured text in various formats, unstructured text, spoken text, audio, video, tables, graphs, diagrams, images, maps, equations, chemical formulas, etc." to help "intelligence analysts to spot the telltale signs of strategic surprise."

By now, we all know what that means.