Your reluctance to submit to the gentle jackboot on your neck is evidence of your unAmerican tendancies and your love of Islamofascists.

Why stop (or even begin) at Congress? I think just a little insight into Cheney's Energy Taskforce might give us a bit of "unvarnished truth" regarding the wholesale whoring out of our government.

My reading of Cheney's view on privacy is that it's important for executive branches, corporate boardrooms, and high net worth taxpayers. The rest of us? Not so much.

Wow. And whenever we have trusted the government to "properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information" it has willingly sold it to the highest bidder. I keenly recall that information aggregated using people's social security numbers was never to be required of anyone but the government. What assurances are we to be given that normal citizens will not be denied vital services and/or access to basic necessities without further invasions of privacy? What will they be worth?

Are... are they also terrorists?

With every passing day, I can't help but feel that Daedalus is one step closer to coming online and that soon we'll have UNATCO soldiers running around muttering, 'Goddamn terrorists!'

That's because the American definitions of conservative and liberal are so skewed that other political groups in the world don't even recognize them. The people we call liberals would be considered far right by most of the rest of the world, and our conservatives would be considered either religious fanatics or Fascists.

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
~Benjamin Franklin

Yeah, you got me. I actually had to sift through the thread twice before I ever noticed Edwin's post. Must need more caffeine today.

Romantic reactionaries at that. Their "turning back the clock" goes to a time and place that never really existed. The "bright shining city on the hill" was only luminescent because it was on fire.

What is needed to move this discussion from whinging into the realm of use is a contemporary definition of "reasonable expectation of privacy".

With CCTV, online records, and digital communications it is possible to monitor data in way that never was before. Our understanding of this must adapt.

An example from my field is how library catalogs are different from Amazon. Amazon collects all sorts of data about shoppers and uses it to customize recommendations for them. Consumers have voted with their wallets and rewarded Amazon w/ lots of money for this "service". Libraries, on the other hand, by and large refuse to collect personally identifiable records or to keep them when their purpose is served. It isn't just that libraries won't give law enforcement lists of information that people read, they refuse to keep it in the first place. When you return a book to the library, all record of your ever having checked that book out is permanently destroyed. Same with browsing records, if the library is doing its job correctly, caches are cleared and browser history cannot be tied to a patron's library card. (Of course, not all libraries are conscientious about this, but that is the principle.)

What happens if people prefer to have data on them collected and stored, rather than having their privacy protected? I don't see a public outrage against AT&T giving up their customer's information w/o a warrant. Or rather, I only see the same people who complain about everything. It doesn't appear to bother your average person that big companies allow the government to spy on its citizens.

Britain went through a lot of this w/ CCTV and appears to have conceded the point, anonymity is not to be expected in public spaces. There is no existing standard to decide these issues, so if people accept that our digital communications and documents do not carry the expectation of anonymity and privacy, then they don't.

I want to get worked up about this, but honestly, I don't feel like being paternalistic on behalf of an apathetic public. In my professional work (as a public servant) I will keep privacy/anonymity as one of my highest priorities. It is just a little deflating to realize that hardly anyone knows/cares that we are doing this. It just doesn't matter to people. I care, but my donations to the ACLU and EFF are not exactly efficacious. I'm just cynical because in our democracy people are volunteering to waive their rights.

What is needed is a generally agreed upon standard for privacy. I just can't see that happening, with so many folks so happy to live without privacy. It seems that most people really are satisfied with "you don't have anything to hide if you haven't done anything wrong". Red light cameras, cctv, warrantless wiretapping, allowing law enforcement to define "terrorist" as they see fit, RIAA download monitoring, cable/phone companies spying on their customers, etc. As technology evolves, the rules are changing, and in the US it doesn't appear that your average citizen cares. We accept online stores that track our purchases, personalized adds on facebook, grocery store cards that monitor our every purchase, ATMs that record our picture when we get cash, gps devices that track our movement, RFID chips in our purchases and IDs, etc. I don't want to come off as some sort of alarmist, I'm not necessarily against new tech. I just acknowledge that w/ the new tech comes the need for new rules. There are some positive laws (HIPAA & FERPA) that make clear that privacy is expected in some areas. But as a general rule folks are so eager to sign away their rights, I'm not optimistic that the next generation will have the same expectation of privacy that our parents' generation did.

Avoiding a tangential discussion of what rights really are, I guess the reason why is democracy. I don't think we should, but inevitable outcomes don't have to care about what we think "should" happen or our rights.

I'm not supporting our privacy right eroding, and when in a better mood I get excited about educating folks on what the concept means and why ordinary citizens and not just terrorists, drug dealers, dead-beat dads, and illegal aliens should be interested protecting privacy.

I guess the test case for me is AT&T and their giving up private info to the governement without a warrant. If congress agrees that "because the government wants it" trumps corporations legal responsibility to their customers; I don't see us coming back from that. If Congress and the public roll over and say that the FBI and corporations will not be held accountable to the people, then it can't be said that we have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

I think a large part of the apathy of the public is that they aren't aware that this is happening, or if they are aware they aren't interested enough to think about it and realize its significance. Or maybe they even honestly, truly believe that they are law abiding citizens, therefore this level of surveillance won't effect them. After all, the government wouldn't be scrutinizing you if you hadn't done something wrong.

Ranalin, the quest for power is not at all new to this decade. It's just the way politics works. Any politician that is willing to sacrifice their career for an ideal is soon out of the job and without influence. Any politician that waits until they have power to enact change is defeated and voted out or fired. It's not that all politicians crave nothing but power, it's just that only those that do ever make it to the top.

That is a good point. The remarkable thing about the Nixon revelations was not the abuse of surveillance or the illegal war activities, it was that the government was held some-what responsible and public opinion swung heavily toward protecting privacy.

Now that we have been de-sensitized by Iran-Contra, and the current administrations legion of scandals, the same revalations don't seem to have much effect on Joan Q. Public. To pull one article out of many, it is pretty clear that the current administration is crying "terrorist" and using the expanded powers granted to fight terrorism to expand its powers.

I suppose one could be optimistic and hope that another scandal will have the corrective effect that Whitewater had, but with serious impeachment talks held over Reagan's violation of the Boland Amendment, Clinton actually mpeached for perjury and obstruction, and now impeaching Bush or Cheney both being discussed, it is becoming just another political tactic and not taken terribly seriously.

I remember when Bush hired John Poindexter to head up the Information Awareness Office despite multiple felony convictions for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury, defrauding the government, and the alteration and destruction of evidence. When concerned citizens decided to treat him like a common sex offender by publishing his address in Potomac, MD, they were harassed by federal law enforcement until that information was removed from the Internet.

It appears that "privacy" has an entirely different meaning to the powerful.

It's a pretty typical tactic nowadays, though. Lots of examples of folks getting smeared in person because someone took a dislike to what they said, and had someone post their contact information for everyone to see. Never means it's right to do, but that sort of thing keeps cropping up.