Congress didn't kill Poindexter's Total Information Access project. (That's total access to information on you -- credit card records, travel records, everything). They just kept him from putting it into service -- which he wasn't ready for anyway. He can research all he likes, under certain conditions. One of which is the appointment of a privacy officer.

Where to find such a person. How about the former privacy officer of notorious internet snoops Doubleclick?

As long as I'm posting, Teresa Nielsen Hayden points out that the disappearance of Iraqi government records in the looting makes it impossible to refute all those stunningly specific claims that Dubya's flacks were making about Iraqi WMD programs before the war. How convenient.

Now consider that coalition forces actually encouraged looting of government offices. Except the oil ministry -- they wanted those records preserved.

Teresa has also posted a refutation of various pinheads who are trying to argue the false choice between protecting artifacts and records, or protecting, say, Iraqi civilians (not that they were doing a whole lot of that either; due to Rumsfeld's deliberate shortchanging of the force, it was barely adequate to protect itself).