In a New York Times op-ed last month, Shane Harris looked at a decade of secret government surveillance and why we're still powerless against it.

Today, this global surveillance system continues to grow. It now collects so much digital detritus -- e-mails, calls, text messages, cellphone location data and a catalog of computer viruses -- that the N.S.A. is building a 1-million-square-foot facility in the Utah desert to store and process it.

What's missing, however, is a reliable way of keeping track of who sees what, and who watches whom. After T.I.A. was officially shut down in 2003, the N.S.A. adopted many of Mr. Poindexter's ideas except for two: an application that would "anonymize" data, so that information could be linked to a person only through a court order; and a set of audit logs, which would keep track of whether innocent Americans' communications were getting caught in a digital net.

Harris will join The Daily Circuit Thursday to discuss the country's current surveillance system and what restrictions he'd like to see. Mike German, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office, will also join the discussion.

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