Civil libertarians can breathe easier. According to Wired magazine, John Poindexter’s Terrorism Information Awareness program – formerly the Total Information Awareness program – appears dead, killed by a Senate committee.

Critics on the left and right have called TIA an attempt to impose Big Brother on Americans. The program would use advanced data-mining tools and a mammoth database to find patterns of terrorist activities in electronic data trails left behind by everyday life.

The proposed TIA program was never as much of a threat to civil liberties as its critics suggested, and the potential merits were considerable. Most of the critics never understood that the technology is fairly straightforward and it’s easy to prevent against abuse. The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald and Corante’s Arnold Kling made that abundantly clear.