Twenty years ago, the privacy hawk Senator Wyden helped kill an infamous post-9/11 program called Total Information Awareness. He’s still trying to rein it in.

After the 9/11 attacks, one big concern was connecting the dots. Failing to do so was why we missed the warning signs of the attacks and how we would prevent the next ones, the thinking went. One solution, according to the Pentagon, was a project to gather as much data as possible, to look for signs of future bad behavior.