If there aren't enough agents or translators to review all the false positives that random surveillance produces now, even before adding mass surveillance of U.S.-based communications to the mix, there's no reason to believe Judge Richard A. Posner's recent assertion that data mining from the innocent will enable detection of a terrorist plot collected from scattered, tiny bits of information.

Mass surveillance isn't just illegal, it's probably a bad idea. We need to ferret out real terrorists, not create a smoke screen of expensive and distracting false positives that they can hide behind. More information doesn't make us smarter. We need smarter information.

Well, our first step is to develop an inexpensive, efficient, interoperable travel card system. To strike the right balance between security and facilitation, we have to incorporate 21st century technology and innovation, and so by the end of this year our departments anticipate issuing a new, inexpensive secure travel card for land border crossings that will meet the documentation requirements of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative but in a way that does not necessarily require people to have passports of the traditional kind.

This new People Access Security Service, or PASS system card, will be particularly useful for those citizens in border communities who regularly cross northern and southern borders every day and an integral part of their daily lives. We're talking about essentially like the kind of drivers license or other simple card identification that almost all of us carry in our wallets day in and day out.

Now, the PASS system is an important first step in implementing a broader shared vision for a unified, user-friendly system for trusted travelers. Secretary Rice and I have been working together to establish a global enrollment network that will unify our various registered traveler programs into a single comprehensive system. The idea here is to get necessary information only one time from an applicant and then create a system, an architecture, that allows both DHS and State Department officers to get access to this data to confirm the traveler's identity.