Declan McCullagh’s great site Politechbot.com has the transcript of Pentagon briefing on Poindexter’s “TIA” program.
Take a look. Some samples:

My statement goes along the following: The war on terror and the tracking of potential terrorists and terrorist acts require that we search for clues of such activities in a mass of data. It’s kind of a signal-to-noise ratio. What are they doing in all these things that are going on around the world? And we decided that new capabilities and new technologies are required to accomplish that task. Therefore, we established a project within DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, that would develop an experimental prototype — underline, experimental prototype, which we call the Total Information Awareness System. The purpose of TIA would be to determine the feasibility of searching vast quantities of data to determine links and patterns indicative of terrorist activities.
There are three parts to the TIA project to aid in this anti-terrorist effort. The first part is technologies that would permit rapid language translation, such as you — as we have used on the computers now, we can — there’s voice recognition capabilities that exist on existing computers.
The second part was discovery of connections between transactions — such as passports; visas; work permits; driver’s license; credit card; airline tickets; rental cars; gun purchases; chemical purchases — and events — such as arrest or suspicious activities and so forth. So again, it try to discover the connections between these things called transactions.
And the third part was a collaborative reasoning-and-decision-making tools to allow interagency communications and analysis. In other words, what kind of decision tools would permit the analysts to work together in an interagency community?
The experiment will be demonstrated using test data fabricated to resemble real-life events. We’ll not use detailed information that is real. In order to preserve the sanctity of individual privacy, we’re designing this system to ensure complete anonymity of uninvolved citizens, thus focusing the efforts of law enforcement officials on terrorist investigations. The information gathered would then be subject to the same legal projections (sic) currently in place for the other law enforcement activities.

OK, it’s a prototype. On one hand, we want the government to be testing all kinds of things; on the other prototypes have a way of subtly going into production.
Worth digging more deeply, and take a look at the transcript yourself.