Guess who's winning the security-vs.-privacy fight?

In the nervous post-9/11 period, John Poindexter, the retired admiral and Iran-contra figure, created for the Pentagon a Big Brother intelligence operation, Total Information Awareness, that included comprehensive data mining and electronic surveillance.

But Poindexter's brainchild was too sweeping even for a security-conscious Congress; the program and Poindexter's job were axed in 2003.

In a later interview with Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, Poindexter expressed no regrets. "One of the remarkable things about ideas is that once you surface an idea and it is a good idea, in the long term there is very little that can be done to stop it."

The Senate is about to extend government's surveillance powers, the latest in a series of actions that have made Poindexter a prophet. In the wake of 9/11, the United States has become a society under constant surveillance, with resultant loss of personal privacy.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell warns that, without the current legislation, a terrorist attack could happen any time. In an election year, Democrats won't block a bill that might make Americans feel safer.

There is a sense of futility in the entire debate, because Americans have essentially lost their privacy. The horse is out of the barn and long down the road.

Technology, that great American joy, opened the barn door and private business and federal agencies stole the horse.

After 9/11, a virtual marriage took place between federal intelligence agencies and high-powered information firms with access to every detail of our private lives. Powering all this are mega-computers that allow billions of files of information to be scanned and analyzed almost instantaneously.

Much of this began with the desire of businesses in such fields as credit and mortgages to know as much as possible about applicants; add to this employers checking the backgrounds of job applicants, and marketers profiling every customer's shopping habits. Additional data flow into computers linking medical records, driving and car-registration records, travel information and much, much more.

These massive, private data banks can be linked and mined by supercomputers. Increasingly, federal security agencies have gained access to this private data on national-security grounds. Profiles of security risks result, watch lists are created.

The potential for national security is apparent, but these programs, all hidden behind the shield of national security, also have the potential to be turned against citizens who, for one reason or another, are seen as troublemakers or dissidents. Imagine J. Edgar Hoover on steroids.

The military has been in this field 50 years; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was created to keep American military technology ahead of the Soviet Union. In its first 40 years, it spent $50 billion and its research produced leading-edge weapons and inspired spinoff hi-tech firms, some of which became defense contractors.

The link between the military and those businesses is money. Information technology is expensive and highly competitive; new firms in particular benefit enormously from government contracts. In a similar vein, federal agencies cannot hire all the brains in this field — government employment is seldom first choice for youngtechies who work, act and think in unconventional ways.

As a result, surveillance experts in government and business form bridges that benefit both — tax money funds private research and development, which is then hired back by security and intelligence agencies. Like the arms industry, information executives move from one side to another, networking their contacts for mutual benefit.

The next step will involve computer security. Every day, the Defense and State departments detect 5 million unauthorized computer-network probes; German and British agencies report a similar problem, and all blame Chinese and Russian hackers.

"There are 40,000 Chinese hackers who are collecting intelligence off U.S. information systems," a security expert told The New Yorker's Lawrence Wright.

Protecting the vast American information network is a passion of McConnell, the director of national intelligence. From an economic standpoint, he believes a cyberattack on a major American bank would have been more devastating than 9/11. To combat this danger and also protect vital government networks, access may be demanded to a lot of systems used by ordinary Americans.

It is extraordinarily complex, and raises to a new level the clash of security versus privacy, a battle security has been winning since 9/11. Since much of this is highly secret, Congress works with less than full information, and the public with virtually none. In the age of total information, huge decisions are made dependent upon trust in a government that has not always been trustworthy.