Where’s William Proxmire when you need him?

As a senator from Wisconsin, Proxmire smoked out foolish government spending with a vengeance, annually bestowing the Golden Fleece Award on the most outrageous examples of slap-your-forehead misappropriations.

His very first award uncovered an $84,000 National Science Foundation study of the reasons that people fall in love.

Over the years, Proxmire recognized such profligacy as the $68,160 that the Urban Mass Transit Administration spent to send officials to Orlando, Fla., to study Disney’s secrets for motivating employees. The $47 million that the Federal Aviation Administration spent to pay debts for bankrupt airlines that had bought planes using federally guaranteed loans. The $160,000 spent by the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke to study the hexing powers of drawing an “X” on someone’s chest during a strength test. And the $98,000 that the Commerce Department spent on a private firm to evaluate the department’s public relations performance.

Who’s going to howl about the folly of a new undertaking from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the “odortype detection program”?

Go to the Federal Business Opportunities Web page for the government-speak solicitation of “innovative proposals” to determine whether individuals can be identified by their genetically set odor-prints — and whether technology can be developed to track people by their unique aromas.

In other words, does it make scents for the government to try monitoring us by smell-o-vision?

As though knowing all about your educational, credit-card use, telephoning, banking, churchgoing, gun-owning and other habits wasn’t enough.

“The goal of phase one will be to determine whether an exploitable, robust signature corresponding to individual human odortype exists,” the official notice reads. “The goal of phase two will be to build a detector that can reliably detect the signature identified in phase one with high sensitivity and specificity.”

And no more than $3.2 million of your tax money will go to this research and development during fiscal 2003.

Anyone who has spent time in a locker room, on a bus in the summer or in a crowded elevator could advise DARPA about odortypes. But obviously they’re looking for something that will make it easier to detect miscreants and misanthropes.

What does a terrorist smell like? Can you sniff out beforehand who’s going to be one?

Actually, although this project may sound like just the latest wackiness, the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based nonprofit dedicated to public service journalism, reported recently that DARPA has doled out grants for several years to college researchers to study gait and odor identification.

But it’s one thing to smell Aunt Agatha’s perfume a mile away or have the person closest to you being able to know you’re there even in the dark. It’s quite another to have even your most intimate details stored in a government computer just in case you start acting suspiciously.

It’s worse than living in a small town. Instead of everyone reporting your behavior to your parents, it’s Big Brother who has eyes, ears and noses in your business.

We can tell ourselves that the government is acting in our best interests and trying to protect us and deserves our trust. But the possibilities for information abuse are boundless.

Consider, for instance, what has happened to John Poindexter, the disgraced Reagan administration official who now heads the Information Awareness Office at the Pentagon and is charged with developing an advanced data-sharing system known as Total Information Awareness.

Cyber-critics have circulated his home phone number and a satellite photo of his neighborhood, posted a form seeking Poindexter sightings and put online a bio of his son, who’s training to be an astronaut.

And these are folks who care about privacy.