The Growth of an American Surveillance Society.”

[David Farber <farber () tmail com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Steinhardt <BSteinhardt () aclu org>
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society.”
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 07:41:00 -0500

Dave,

I thought IP members would like to know about a new ACLU report, 
“Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance 
Society.”

This report grew out of our sense here at the ACLU that in order to make 
progress on the privacy issue, we have to shift the terms of the 
debate.  When viewed in isolation, many new privacy invasions seem 
harmless to many Americans, who don’t see why they should care that 
(for example) someone is recording the date and time that they drive 
through a tollbooth.  To understand the privacy issue one has to look at 
the big picture  to understand that each new piece of information 
collected about us, no matter how seemingly harmless, is increasingly 
being added together with thousands of other data points to create an 
extremely intrusive, high-resolution picture of our lives.

The need to shift the terms of the debate on privacy to focus more on 
the big picture was made a lot easier by the breaking of the story of 
the Pentagon/Poindexter Total Information Awareness program  and that 
story has provided the perfect opportunity to try to spark a broader 
discussion of how we are going to handle all the intrusive new 
technologies that are being developed, and what we are going to let this 
country turn into.

The report is available on-line at 
http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=11573&c=39.

Barry Steinhardt
-- Dave

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To unsubscribe or update your address, click
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/