What does the government know about you?
It seems that one of the most paranoid suppositions regarding government control of regular citizens is partly true. Wired reports that they managed to procure declassified documents that show that FBI uses a data-mining system to track down terrorists, but to do this they also gather information about regular citizens going about their lives.
Among the data in the system are travel records, financial forms by banks, hotel and rental-car company records, credit card transactions, telephone records, etc., coming from well known enterprises like Sears, Avis and the Cendant Hotel chain.
