Growth of an American Surveillance Society

¶ … Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society

Issued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in January 2003, this report is a dim view of the pervasive influence technology has on the private lives of Americans. Written by Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt, the paper examines the various uses of technology by both private industry and the government to collect both visual and written data as well as monitor the movements and habits of private citizens without their consent or knowledge.

The report begins with a warning that our privacy and liberty are at risk. The recent advent of computers, cameras, sensors, wireless communication, GPS, biometrics, cell phone location abilities, and other technologies is "feeding a surveillance monster that is growing in our midst." Furthermore, new technologies such as face recognition programs, implantable GPS and RFID chips, data-mining, DNA chips and "brain wave fingerprinting" are debuting daily. This combined with recent legislation, such as the Patriot Act, which under the guise of national security lowers or eliminates the standards established to determine probable cause for government surveillance, and fails to provide for oversight of government entities that have the capability to perform surveillance activities (thus leaving them unaccountable to the public) promise to further diminish the quality of the privacy and liberty enjoyed in the past.

Video surveillance is rapidly spreading throughout public areas. When centralized this technology allows law enforcement to view images from cameras across a designated area, giving officers the capacity to zoom in on people from cameras a half mile away. Currently there is no evidence to support the assumption that this technology enhances security or reduces crime.

Data surveillance is the collection of information about an identifiable individual, often from multiple sources, that can be assembled into a portrait of that person's activities. The spread of computer chips in our daily lives means that more and more of our activities leave behind data trails. Soon it will be possible to combine information from different sources to recreate an individual's activities with such detail that it becomes no different from being followed around all day by a detective with a video camera. If current trends continue, it will be impossible to have any contact with the outside world that is not watched and recorded.

While communication surveillance by the government, such as telephone wiretapping, has been around for decades, today's technologies cast a far broader net. The FBI's Carnivore program filters through all the traffic on the Internet Service Provider to which it has been attached, including private e-mails. As mentioned earlier the passage of the Patriot Act loosened the evidence needed by government to justify an intelligence wiretap.

The commodification of personal information by corporations has become a multi-billion -- dollar industry. Companies called data aggregators are in the business of compiling detailed databases on individuals and then selling that information to others. The authors report the Justice Department has an $8 million contract with data aggregator ChoicePoint that allows government agents to tap into the company's vast database of personal information on individuals. Although the Privacy Act of 1974 banned the government from maintaining information on citizens who are not the targets of investigations, the FBI can now evade that requirement by simply purchasing information that has been collected by the private sector.

The report also notes threats to personal financial information as well as medical and genetic information that potentially may be used to discriminate against individuals seeking employment or insurance. Furthermore in 2002 new guidelines on domestic spying were issued that significantly increased the freedom of federal agents to American individuals and organizations.