The ACLU has just released a new report: "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society." On Dave Farber's list today, Barry Steinhardt writes:
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.
