Science fiction author, Bruce Sterling, shares his thoughts about Total Information Awareness (or as it has been renamed - Terrorist Information Awareness) with CNET reporter Declan McCullaugh. Sterling believes that Americans, now unable to flee their "data shadow", and will be "decapitated and lobotomized".

I'll tell you what will happen if it were an effective TIA. There would immediately be a series of coups inside the Republican Party as the people who owned the KGB survival mechanism were systemically outed and "Trent Lotted"...It would be profoundly destabilizing. Their sexual affairs would be public. They'd be "Lewinskied." They'd be "Whitewatered."

The common population would stand aghast as these people did one another in. It would not stop once the surveillance mechanism was there. It would eat generation after generation of KGB members until it decapitated and lobotomized the entire population.

There are plenty of Republican senators now who know what happened to Trent Lott--how can they not? They have street smarts. They're aware that he was nailed because people happened to record something that was at the practical funeral of a centenarian.