Rich Gordon emailed to point out this multimedia report about government surveillance. Of particular interest is this interactive feature on the government’s many existing surveillance programs. There are dozens and dozens of them, touching virtually every aspect of our lives.
Most of them seem pretty innocuous individually. For example, government surveillance of large currency transactions probably strikes most people as harmless. But as you go down the list, it becomes obvious that the whole has the potential to be a lot more than the sum of its parts. If the government tracks you every time you visit your bank, every time you get on an airline, every time you apply for financial aid, every time you apply for a driver’s license, every time you apply for a credit card, and on and on, pretty soon the government has a bit of data about almost every facet of your life.
Moreover, those are just the programs the government admits to. The press has uncovered two secret programs that engage in surveillance via the telephone network. And there are doubtless others that have not yet been uncovered.
The sheer complexity of these widely varied programs makes it especially difficult for grassroots action to deal with. If there were a single Big Brother program, the ACLU or EFF might be able to organize a grassroots backlash against it. But developing backlashes against Big Uncle, Big Cousin, Big Sister, and dozens of other piecemeal intrusions on our privacy is much more difficult. You kill one head of the hydra, and three more sprout up in its place.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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