I read a chilling article in the Wall Street Journal this evening, entitled, “U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens.”

Yep … that means you and me – data about us law abiding citizens will now be analyzed by government officials, all without judicial warrant or probable cause.

Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime. …

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. …

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior.

It was way back in my high school days when I read and was terrified by the prospects of George Orwell‘s novel Nineteen Eighty Four.  Orwell might have predicted the wrong year, but what once seemed like far-fetched political satire seems disturbingly like accurate prophesy.