U.S. Becomes Surveillance Society
American 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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