In June 1975, more than twenty-five years before the Total Information Awareness imbroglio, a series of sensational news reports warned of a new Orwellian-sounding computer technology that would be used to create dossiers on individual Americans. “What this technology means to you is this: The Federal Government now has the means to put together a computer file on you, or almost any American, within a matter of minutes,” Ford Rowan, a correspondent for NBC Nightly News, reported. “The key breakthrough in the new computer technology was made by a little known unit of the Defense Department—the
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