No Online Privacy in America

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No Online Privacy in America

Along with its many benefits, the march of technology makes an encompassing surveillance network seem almost inevitable. We owe much of the privacy we have enjoyed in the past to a combination of immature technology and insufficient manpower to monitor us. But these protective inefficiencies are giving way to efficient technologies of data processing and digital surveillance that threaten to eliminate our privacy. Already we are tracked by our credit-card transactions, our passes through the fast-lanes at toll booths, our cell phone calls.

Each year brings more sensitive and widespread sensing devices, including cameras, microphones, and, potentially, biological sensors, all of which are being connected through increasingly efficient networks to increasingly more powerful data processing and storage. Cameras are proliferating, in toll plazas, on public streets, and in public parks. We welcome them as crime-fighters, even as they eliminate our ability to move through the world untracked. Face and voice recognition software may soon permit image data from surveillance cameras to be cross-referenced to data based profiles of each person observed. To get a hint of the future, enter your street address at globexplorer.com. You will see a satellite picture nearly good enough to show a car parked in your driveway, or in mine. Better resolution is coming soon.

We are moving toward a transparent society in which our actions and transactions are followed, our lives tracked and documented, by folks we neither know nor trust; each of us a star in our own Truman Show. (online Privacy)

By now, you have probably heard a lot of debate over the USA Patriot Act, the federal legislation passed to give investigators more tools for apprehending terrorists. Proponents of the law say we need it to protect ourselves. Opponents say it threatens our constitutional rights. Nevertheless, whatever position you take on these issues, it is important to know how the new law will affect your life online.

The Patriot Act is complex and powerful. It broadens the definition of terrorism and increases the penalties for terrorism.

Some of the more sweeping changes involve electronic surveillance. The act permits federal investigators to use more-powerful tools to monitor phone calls, e-mail messages, and even Web surfing. We all hope that means agents will be better able to arrest terrorists and foil their plans. But the changes also mean we now have even less guarantee of privacy on the Net.

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