And this from a 1987 post: "Current online database vendors like Dialog and Mead Data Central are already foreshadowings (albeit extremely primitive) of a GHA. It is interesting to recall that under the reign of John Poindexter, of Irangate fame, the NSC was seeking to gain legal access to the records of these companies, which store sensitive information about the search targets and patterns of their users. As I recall, the NSC was denied legal access by Congress, but then there is always the problem of illegal access, which is relatively trivial to accomplish wholesale by intercepting telecommunications."
see google...
