FBI's all-seeing database project loses funds

The US House Science and Technology Committee voted to deny the FBI $11 million to continue work on a massive database of government records on virtually all American citizens. The vote came after the FBI refused to tell Congress about its plans.

The idea was to use all that data to somehow predict who might be a potential so-called "terrorist" -- without a hint of probable cause to indicate any specific individual was linked to any radical or extremist group or ideology.

It is the sort of plan that the former East German STASI, the secret police thought to have employed up to one in three East Germans as government informants, would have wet its pants to have implemented. Terms that come to mind are "Panopticon" and "Orwellian."