U.S. Becomes Surveillance SocietyAmerican Civil Liberties Union
Big Brother is now a realistic possibility.
The United States has now reached the point where a total “surveillance society” has become a realistic possibility, the American Civil Liberties Union warns in a new report.
“Many people still do not grasp that Big Brother surveillance is no longer the stuff of books and movies,” said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program and a co-author of the report.
“Given the capabilities of today’s technology, the only thing protecting us from a full-fledged surveillance society are the legal and political institutions we have inherited as Americans,” he added. “Unfortunately, the September 11 attacks have led some to embrace the fallacy that weakening the Constitution will strengthen America.”
The ACLU said that its report, Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society, is an attempt to step back from the daily march of stories about new surveillance programs and technologies and survey the bigger picture. The report argues that even as surveillance capacity grows like a “monster” in our midst, the legal “chains” needed to restrain that monster are being weakened. The report cites not only new technology but also erosions in protections against government spying, the increasing amount of tracking being carried out by the private sector, and the growing intersection between the two.
...A recent illustration of the danger, according to the ACLU report, is the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, which seeks to sift through a vast array of databases full of personal information in the hunt for terrorism. “Even if TIA never materializes in its current form,” Steinhardt said, “what this report shows is that the underlying trends are much bigger than any one program or any one controversial figure like John Poindexter.”
The report was authored by Steinhardt and Jay Stanley, Public Education Director of the Technology and Liberty Program.
(Read the complete article here.)
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