"Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into … a virtual, centralized grand database,” the New York Times columnist warns.

On the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s numerous government testimonies and sustained criticism over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the author of this Times column must be talking about Facebook—right? Or perhaps the web’s broader, ad-based business model?

Not so: The William Safire column, "You Are a Suspect,” was published in the Times in 2002—two years before Facebook was created. And Safire isn’t talking about social networks or digital advertising—he’s discussing Total Information Awareness, a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) program that proposed mining vast amounts of Americans’ data to identify potential national security threats. The virtual grand database was to belong to the Department of Defense, which would use it to identify behavior patterns that would help to predict emerging terrorist threats.

Renee DiResta (@noUpside) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, the director of research at New Knowledge, and a Mozilla fellow on media, misinformation and trust. She is affiliated with the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University.

Today, we’re voluntarily participating in the dystopian scenario Safire envisioned 16 years ago, with each bit of data handed to companies like Facebook and Google. But in this system, private companies are our information repositories—leaving us to reckon with the consequences of a world that endows corporations with the kind of data once deemed too outrageous for the government.

The Total Information Awareness project, run by Admiral John Poindexter, was a meta-program. It was designed to aggregate signals generated via other programs run out of Darpa’s Information Awareness Office. The programs focused on a range of capabilities, including information analysis, decision-support tools, language translation, data mining, and pattern recognition. When the component parts were combined, they would form a comprehensive picture of people and their behaviors. The purpose was to detect signals that could be used to identify terrorist behavior and head off attacks; the inspiration was the fact that the government had failed to connect the dots left by the 9/11 terrorists as they planned their attack.

Concern about the program was bipartisan and widespread. The Cato Institute warned of the potential for a surveillance society and raised Fourth Amendment concerns. The ACLU called it a virtual dragnet that would require the government “to collect as much information as it can about everyone—and these days, that is a LOT of information … Not only government records of all kinds but individuals' medical and financial records, political beliefs, travel history, prescriptions, buying habits, communications (phone calls, emails and web surfing), school records, personal and family associations, and so on.” The US Senate, led by senators Ron Wyden and Byron Dorgan, voted unanimously to defund the program shortly after it was announced; some of the technological underpinnings were reshuffled, sent to other parts of the government that weren’t focused on the activities of US citizens.

But as Total Information Awareness was being disassembled in Washington, DC, a similar system emerged, and began to gather momentum, in Silicon Valley. Within a few years, top industry trend reports and VC blog posts began to talk up the power (and economic promise) of “Big Data” and “Social Mobile Local.”

Today, you can probably name several companies that have access to data on every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy, every website you visit and email you send or receive, every trip you book, and every event you attend—all the various types of data that Safire referenced, but gathered to identify behavior patterns that help predict what ads you’ll click on.

In the private sector, startups and large companies alike began to tout how well they could gather, store, and mine data; it was a popular business model. The fact that it was happening was hardly a secret—personalized ads within Gmail, universal logins, and retargeted ads following us from site-to-site were readily apparent to even minimally savvy users. The biggest tech companies in the world succeeded because they built products users loved—their users voluntarily opted in to giving up their information and behavioral data. Widespread tracking and data aggregation became the norm, as universal logins, tracking pixels, forays into linked products (Gmail, for example), and acquisitions of startups enabled the tech platforms to build comprehensive profiles of users with ease.