WASHINGTON -- Not even if you're in the new, supposedly improved CIA, do you know everything the federal government knows about you. Nobody does, but it's far more voluminous than we thought.

		Ann McFeatters is National Bureau chief for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (amcfeatters@ nationalpress.com, 1-202-662-7071).

Since the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, a vast new industry has mobilized to learn what we read, if we vote, what we buy at the supermarket, where we buy gas, what Web sites we visit, what our e-mails say, what magazines we subscribe to, whom we call on our cell phones and where we're calling from, what TV shows we watch, what movies we go to, where we fly (and why and when), how we dress, what drugs we take, details of our sex lives, what we ordered at a restaurant or bar and what the names of our pets are.

Information-technology companies eagerly began, in the name of patriotism, to provide the government with all manner of details in hopes it would prevent future terrorist attacks. But the practice of getting seemingly useless information proliferated because it is a moneymaker. Business became excited about selling this information because all this collection of data refines marketing to the point where fewer advertising dollars are wasted on the wrong people.

Through the miracle of computers, however, government is sucking up all this data and filing it away for use at will. This does not require vast, dusty warehouses, but a few computers.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Information is power. If Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., can be mistakenly put on a federal do-not-fly watch list and for weeks not be permitted to board a plane without a hassle, it can happen to anyone. Ever try convincing the federal government it has made a mistake? Ever try convincing a Transportation Security Administration employee at an airport that you're not that William Smith or whomever? And where do you go to get your identity back, anyway?

The fact is that the pre-9/11 federal government did have enough information to stop the terrorist plot that killed 3,000 people. The government just failed to connect the dots. That's what the restructuring of the intelligence community is designed to fix.

But while Congress has been rearranging flow charts, the genie of information technology burst forth. It threatens to become a nightmare, not so much for the terrorists lurking among us, but for the rest of the population that would prefer Big Brother leave them alone.

Electronic chips are going into our passports. There is a drive in Congress to make your driver's license a national identity card. You'll soon be able to charge food at the corner grocery store with your thumbprint, if you don't already.

The new Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (Matrix) merges billions of innocuous details about Americans with government and criminal records.

In a just-published book, "No Place to Hide," Robert O'Harrow Jr., a reporter for The Washington Post, wrote, "More than ever before, the details about our lives are no longer our own. They belong to the companies that collect them, and the government agencies that buy or demand them in the name of keeping us safe."

In other words, he said, our daily lives are being recorded by millions of computers and cameras and we have no control over where, how, when or if the data is used -- or whether for good or ill.

At a recent panel discussion sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a liberal group that advocates for a "strong, just and free America," Nuala O'Connor Kelly, chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security, confided that she is alarmed by the growing support for national identification cards. Even though officials may promise to use such IDs in the way intended, she warned, "People change at the top. When they leave [government], their promises go, too," unless specifically spelled out in law.

Some conservatives in Congress are pushing hard to make driver's licenses national identity cards, attaching the provision to an urgent bill funding the war in Iraq.

Our society is changing at a breakneck pace. While there are indisputably strong arguments for more secure identification measures, rushing through an ill-thought-out effort to mandate how states handle driver's licenses for identification purposes is appalling.

We Americans need to start thinking through how we feel about all these changes and the huge national policy decisions that are quietly being made without us before the thought police stop us.

Think it can't happen? After graduating from Harvard, Lindsay Moran joined the CIA in 1998 and became a case officer. She quit in 2003 and wrote a book about her experience, "Blowing My Cover." She left outraged by the "standard of mediocrity" she said she found taking root there, coupled with an unwritten directive to hire only those who fit a mold it termed "normal."