The Electronic Frontier Foundation Defending Freedom in the Digital World Report on Data Aggregation

The primary concern of the EFF is the use of data aggregation by the government to assemble personal profiles of American citizens and identify potential terrorists. In projects like Total Information Awareness, the government has proposed to use combinations of medical, financial, educational, employment, travel, and telephone records to search for patterns of transactions that are suggestive of terrorist activity. While the EFF understands the need for national security, TIA and similar projects are unlikely to be effective in practice and will raise too many security and privacy concerns in the process.