Datamining's typical approach—analyzing vast quantities of information instead of targeting based on individualized suspicion—may be fine when used by private companies such as Amazon.com to predict, for example, that a book will interest you based on your purchasing patterns. It is more problematic when secretly used to stigmatize you, deny you benefits or services, criminalize you by taking your actions out of context, or when combined with other databases to constitute what is effectively an intrusive warrantless search.

A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service recently noted datamining's limitations in counter-terrorism, including issues such as data quality, mission creep (e.g., from counter-terrorism to tax collection or fighting crime generally), human errors in interpretation, terrorist-incident data sets too small to be useful as valid predictive models, false positives, and privacy concerns. Some commentators, including Judge Richard Posner, insist that automated sifting of data cannot, by definition, invade liberty, since it means that "most data is not read by an intelligence officer." Others realize that such vast dragnets can be an instrument of social control that seriously infringes on both privacy and other liberties precisely because people are never quite sure the extent to which they're being monitored.

There are now reportedly over 200 datamining programs scattered throughout U.S. government agencies. Although Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) has repeatedly introduced legislation requiring public reporting of these programs, along with their effectiveness, privacy impact, and ways individuals can be informed and opt out, the bills have not yet passed. These continuing datamining programs raise many issues, not the least of which are the missing independent checks-and-balances and the seemingly reversed presumption of innocence, which auger a serious loss of privacy and control over our own intimate information.

TIME FOR GRASSROOTS ACTION—The perils presented by the president's surveillance programs pale in comparison with the broader threat from his theory of unlimited power, which assaults the rule of law itself (as evident in everything from his "signing statements," by means of which he reserves the right to ignore laws he dislikes; to his detention policies; to the suspension of habeas corpus; and threats to prosecute the free press for reporting on all of these programs). Stephen Colbert recently joked that in a war without limits, the president's power should be unlimited. But the rest of us should be concerned that it's already unlimited if the president can ignore laws like FISA that were passed to stop precisely these sorts of abuses historically arising from unchecked power.

The president's latest move toward complying with FISA is simply one of unilateral discretion that could be revoked at any time; he maintains that he can still depart from FISA at will. As the Supreme Court has previously written, "Fourth Amendment freedoms cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic security surveillances may be conducted solely within the discretion of the Executive Branch."

In short, the reversal is deceptive, of a piece with related deceptions that undergird the administration's imperial ambitions. Among the many presidential lies are Bush's claims that the TSP surveillance: always involved a court order; targeted only international subjects; only related to Al Qaeda and its affiliates; meant that Democrats didn't want to know if Al Qaeda was calling; prevented attacks like the ridiculous "Brooklyn blowtorch" scheme of Iyman Faris; would have prevented the human errors that failed to stop the 9/11 attacks, by identifying hijackers like Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi (whom officials knew were in the U.S. and had monitored but failed to arrest); was necessary and effective (despite thousands of TSP false leads protested by the FBI suggesting the contrary); and has now been terminated, when, as we've seen, it continues in secret under unclear FISA court authority and the datamining programs that persist unhindered.

Excesses like the TSP surveillance not only betray our values, but tend to produce negative practical consequences: insecurity and fear rather than security. Those who ask what harm this can cause if you're innocent might want to recall the many innocent people whose privacy and free expression have already been violated: the U.S. citizens and foreigners rounded up and mistreated after 9/11; those wrongly locked up in Guantánamo Bay and a network of secret detention facilities; the peace activists who have been harassed, spied on, and blocked by "no-fly" lists; and America's general slide toward being one of those fearful surveillance societies we've always thought could not be more different from us. Though terrorists plot to instill such fear, Abraham Lincoln was right to say that only we can destroy ourselves.

The new Congress has thus far not lived up to its promise to address these and other civil liberties and human rights violations and, where necessary, reassert the rule of law. It took grassroots pressure to defeat the president's attempt to legalize these programs during the recent lame-duck session, and it will take grassroots pressure on the new Congress to achieve real reform. Congress must call immediate and comprehensive hearings both to stop this illicit surveillance and to hold accountable those who have ordered it.