SiliconValley.com part of San Jose Mercury News / Dan Gillmor's eJournal (News, Views and a Silicon Valley Diary) January 10, 2003 - Privacy: Going, Going.... Privacy invaders are like termites. They undermine, eating away at the structure of your personal life, until you wake up one day and realize that the foundation is gone. The American Civil Liberties Union, battling harder than ever for your basic rights against increasingly nosy corporate and government snoops, has issued a report that should be raising alarms everywhere. The bottom line is evident in the title: "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society." We're inundated with examples of this or that invasion of privacy, the ACLU says. The current villain is the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness project, which would scoop up all kinds of public and private personal data to look for hints of bad activity including terrorism, according to its Big-Brotherish planners. The individual threats are bad enough, the report says, but consider the bigger picture. "Too many people still do not understand the danger, do not grasp just how radical an increase in surveillance by both the government and the private sector is becoming possible, or do not see that the danger stems not just from a single government program, but from a number of parallel developments in the worlds of technology, law and politics." The best way to slow this erosion is to change laws, the ACLU says. That means you have to be politically active if you care about protecting what's left of your privacy, much less getting back any of what you've already lost. It's getting late. [Privacy Digest]
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