The program, previously called Total Information Awareness, had drawn intense criticism from privacy activists and Congress voted earlier this year to drastically curb the program.

But in a report to lawmakers Tuesday, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said the TIA program would help use technology to stay ahead of terrorists, while safeguarding privacy and civil liberties.

The program, still being developed, "would provide decision- and policy-makers with advance actionable information and knowledge about terrorist planning and preparation activities that would aid in making informed decisions to prevent future international terrorist attacks," the report said.

Critics had assailed the Defense Department program as an Orwellian assault on privacy with vast potential for abuse.

Some fear that everything from credit card transactions and Internet purchases to travel records and e-mails would become part of a government database.

But the DARPA report said the Pentagon "has expressed its full commitment to planning, executing and overseeing the TIA program in a manner that protects privacy and civil liberties."

The name change was made to counter "in some minds the impression that TIA was a system to be used for developing dossiers on US citizens," the report said.

"That is not DoD's (Department of Defense's) intent in pursuing this program. Rather DoD's purpose in pursuing these efforts is to protect US citizens by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats before an attack. To make this objective absolutely clear, DARPA has changed the program name to Terrorism Information Awareness."

But Jim Dempsey at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy group, said Congress should move with caution in any such program.

Dempsey told a House panel there are no existing legal impediments for the government to use "data mining," a technique used by marketing firms, to try to identify terrorist activity, but that the use of this poses many questions.

"Who should approve the patterns that are the basis for scans of private databases and under what standard?," he asked. "What should be the legal rules limiting disclosure to the government of the identity of those whose data fits a pattern? When the government draws conclusions based on pattern analysis, how should those conclusions be interpreted? How should they be disseminated and when can they be acted upon?.

Dempsey added, "We need limits on government surveillance and guidelines for the use of information not merely to protect individual rights but to focus government activity on those planning violence."

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