After 9/11, the White House promised to build a super computer that would track every email, cell phone call and bank transaction in order to prevent the next attack.

But when the details of the new program — called “Total Information Awareness (TIA)” — leaked out, Congress was forced to cancel the program because it seemed so Orwellian and ripe for abuse.

That program will now be resurrected . . . on prime-time television.

CBS’s “Person of Interest” (set to debut in September) is based on the idea that a version of TIA was actually built and is secretly being used on the streets of New York.

Leave it to the guys behind “Lost” and “The Dark Knight” to create a TV show that is so close to the truth.

In real life, the Pentagon was going to create a TIA computer database of all the personal electronic information of everyone in the world to help the government pick the terrorists out of the general population and stop them before they acted.

In “Person of Interest,” the world created by producers J.J. Abrams (“Lost”) and Jonah Nolan (“The Dark Knight”) is slightly different.

On the show, the tech genius who created the program — a mysterious Mr. Finch, played by “Lost” villian Michael Emerson — leaves the government, but takes with him the back-door code for getting back into the program, which he uses for a little vigilante justice.

“I’m a stay-at-home kind of Batman,” Emerson said at last week’s Comic-Con.

The machine on the shows is “software and hardware of a very high order that is incredibly complex,” he says. “But through pattern recognition, it can crunch every kind of surveillance, every e-mail written, every cell-phone conversation, every bit of data out there from every source.”

After churning through all that information, the computer then spits out the social security number of a person who will be involved in a disastrous event — but it doesn’t tell Finch whether the person is the victim or the perpatrator.

That’s where John Reese, played by Jim Caviezel (“Passion of the Christ”), steps in. He’s the ex-CIA muscle behind Finch who prevents the disastrous events Finch detects online.

But in classic Abrams style, the show is more than just a case-of-the-week spy show — it is also a warning about why it was probably a good idea to stop the real-world TIA before it became a reality.

“The government has been trying to kind of build exactly this for the past 10 to 15 years and the only science-fiction part is imagining that they actually managed to build something that worked,” Nolan said at Comic-Con.

“Some people say science-fiction, but this is science-fact,” Caviezel said at Comic-Con.