With all the recent attention on the National Security Agency’s surveillance program–particularly that it was the so-called “data mining” aspects that drew Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card to John Ashcroft’s hospital room back in 2004–I thought it was a good time to recall a story I wrote last summer.

This story goes into considerable detail about the NSA program, as well as DARPA’s Total Information Awareness. It gives a lot of the shared history of these two programs, and it offers the views of some key senior intelligence officials.