Would you trust a government surveillance program with an Illuminati-esque logo with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars? Well, that already happened long ago.

Before the NSA was given power over dragnet surveillance through programs like PRISM in 2007, it tried to launch a rather ham-handed approach to terrorism surveillance called the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, according to a slew of documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request. It could be considered the direct predecessor to programs the NSA has now.

Short of combing through all your information, the TIA program proposed to cross-reference the following:

Bank records

Travel documents

Cell phone usage

Credit card records

FBI files

Medical records

Emails

...and so much more into a big multifaceted system that would be able to "connect the dots" to preempt terrorist attacks.

One of the more frequently mentioned issues the program wanted to tackle was the lurking threat of bioterrorism attacks, likely spurred in part by the 2001 anthrax attacks.