Marriage between private sector and government.

Information service corporations are selling information they gather on us, and selling intelligence software, which provide the tools needed to look at information and find certain patterns and links among people, to local law enforcement and to the federal government. It may be a much more efficient way to track down terrorists, but at the same time it is a little scary that the government has so much data on each and everyone of us, and as Mr. O'Harrow says, there are plenty of mistakes in the information collected.

The government has limits as to how they can create and use information, but now the private sector can do the work the government cannot do. The government can over-step restrictions set in place after the McCarthy hearings to protect our civil liberties.

"Robert O'Harrow, Jr. is a reporter for The Washington Post and an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting. His new book is about how the government is creating a national intelligence infrastructure with the help of private companies as part of homeland security. Huge data-mining operations are contracted by the government to gather information on our daily lives. Information technology has enabled retailers, marketers, and financial institutions to gather and store data about us. O'Harrow's new book about this security-industrial complex is No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society"