Opposition is growing in Congress and among public interest groups to a domestic antiterrorism surveillance program being developed in the Defense Department.

The program, known as Total Information Awareness, would mine the databases of American telephone, financial and travel companies, retailers and other concerns for patterns that suggest terrorist activity.

In the Senate yesterday, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, spoke against the system and introduced an amendment to the omnibus spending bill that would suspend money for the program until Congress gave it a full review.

The program, Mr. Wyden said, "really cries out for some oversight, some accountability and some sensitivity to procedural protections and constitutional rights."

Another senator, Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, meanwhile, planned to introduce separate legislation today that would suspend the program until Congress reviewed it, a spokesman for Mr. Feingold said yesterday.

On Tuesday, a coalition of nine public interest groups from across the political spectrum wrote to Congressional leaders, asking them to rein in the system, which is overseen by John M. Poindexter, who was national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan.

The groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Conservative Union, said the surveillance program "would put the details of Americans' daily lives under the scrutiny of government agents, opening the door to a massive domestic surveillance system." The letter urged that Congress stop the system or at least delay it for "a closer look."

James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group in Washington that is concerned with civil liberties in the digital age and a member of the coalition, said the Bush administration had not explained how it planned to use the data. "We haven't begun to understand this," Mr. Dempsey said.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group, said concerns about privacy transcended notions of liberal and conservative. "This goes back to the founding fathers warning us that if we wanted to keep our liberty, we had to take it seriously," Mr. Norquist said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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