Leave Me Alone! American Privacy Rights Under Attack. Study Warns: "...if the current trend continues, it will be impossible to have any contact with the outside world that is not watched and recorded." The American Civil Liberties Union, the nations premier guardian of liberty, warns in a new report that United States is evolving into a Big Brother society as technology advances and post-Sept 11 surveillance increases. "The reasonable expectation of privacy has been dramatically diminished," Barry Steinhardt, an ACLU director, said in an interview following the release of the report "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society." "A combination of lightning-fast technological innovations and the erosion of privacy protections threatens to transform Big Brother from an oft-cited but remote threat into a very real part of American life," the report said. A growing "surveillance monster" is emerging, it argues, in which the private and the public sector are monitoring Americans with video cameras to the extent that it is becoming almost impossible to walk the streets of major cities without being filmed. Yet there are virtually no rules governing what can be done with those tapes. In one study, the ACLU found that it was impossible to walk around Manhattan without being constantly watched by video cameras nearly every step of the way. According to the report, the explosion in growth of video monitoring of Americans can be attributed to three factors. 1. Improved technology such as digital video, cheaper cameras, cheaper storage and retrieval of images. 2. Centralized surveillance, which allows officers to be seated in one location while viewing images from cameras all across a city, public buildings, streets and neighborhoods, rail and bus stations and schools. The technology allows officers to zoom in on people from a half mile away. 3. Unexamined assumptions that cameras provide security. After the attacks of September 11, the public embraced surveillance as the way to prevent future attacks and prevent crime. But there is no evidence on how cameras will increase security. In fact, in Britain, where video cameras have been extensively used, there is no evidence that they have reduced crime. The United States should also consider the nature of the threat: The fanatics who flew planes into building on September 11 were not concerned with losing their lives to carry out their murderous plot. Do they really fear being photographed or even caught? What about the computer chip technology currently available on the highway? The so-called E-Z Pass system? Could it be used one day to allow police officers to scan your identification when they pass you on the street? Or could it be used to monitor your travel on the highways? Or issue you an automatic speeding ticket if you pass a certain checkpoint on the road too quickly? The study also points to the Total Information Awareness pilot project, in which the Pentagon is exploring amassing a database of Americans' medical, health, financial, tax and other records. There are few privacy laws to prevent businesses from selling the government such information. What kinds of safeguards exist to prevent your employer, your doctor, your pharmacy from giving or even selling your private, personal information to the government? Is it anyone else's business what products you buy? What medications you use? How much money you make each year? "If we do not act to reverse the current trend, data surveillance - like video surveillance - will allow corporations or the government to constantly monitor what individual Americans do every day," the report said. Moreover, under the Patriot Act - the anti-terrorist legislation passed by Congress immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks - the government can demand that libraries turn over reading habits of patrons. Authorities can more easily attain telephone and computer wiretaps, and conduct searches in secret without immediately notifying the target. New rules, the report notes, reinstate the FBI's ability to spy on Americans even when no crime is suspected and allows authorities to share with prosecutors information obtained via search warrants granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. Under FISA court rules, Americans are not protected by the bread-and-butter legal standard of probable cause - prosecutors need only say the search will assist a terror probe. "It is not just the reality of government surveillance that chills free expression and the freedom that Americans enjoy," the report said. "The same negative effects come when we are constantly forced to wonder whether we might be under observation." Law Notes: Read the complete report from the ACLU

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