Friday, January 17, 2003

Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society This report, published by the American Civil Liberties Union, will serve as an excellent summation and starting point for debate on the various threats to hard-won freedoms that we as American take for granted, and that are in dire danger of being lost. It's a slippery slope, and we are standing on precipice, hanging on by our chinny chin chins. Essential reading for those who care. "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." (from the introduction) The report is available on-line (in PDF format) at:   http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacylist.cfm?c=39 7:57:58 PM    comment []

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