National Public Radio’s Morning Edition recently discussed government surveillance, including privacy implications. NPR looks at new technology that would assist in tagging and tracking who looks at what data. Though any such audit system is useful, the bigger problem is that it is unknown who is collecting what data for what purposes. For more about warrantless wiretapping, you can read one of my earlier posts.

Soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government began collecting reams of phone records and other personal information on millions of people in hopes of finding some sort of pattern of suspicious behavior that would reveal unknown terrorists.

That technique, known as data mining, hasn’t been the silver bullet officials had hoped it would be, and privacy advocates say it is an affront to Americans’ civil liberties, since they have no way of knowing who is looking at their personal information or whether the person looking is actually authorized to see it. [...]

Part of the problem is that it isn’t clear what kinds of information the government is gathering. Certainly, intelligence agencies are using government databases with tax records and property titles as part of their search. Treasury Department databases, which track money flows, are undoubtedly in the mix, too. What hasn’t been revealed is the kind of corporate databases that are included. The assumption is that credit card transactions and maybe purchasing habits are vacuumed up too, but so far the government hasn’t said as much. The possibilities are endless, because each and every day, we are all leaving little data trails that are easy to pick up. [...]

Privacy advocates also worry about a more basic problem: the misuse of all this personal information. Two months ago in Massachusetts, law enforcement officials were found to be snooping into the lives of local celebrities. They poked around New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s personal information just because they were curious. So they looked up his address and whether he was a gun owner; they did this 968 times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 and is filed under Anonymity, Civil liberties, Fourth Amendment, Identification, Security, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Possibly related posts:

• Another Update on Lawsuit Accusing Pennsylvania School District of Snooping on Kids
• NPR: Analysts Turn To Software For Spotting Terrorists
• UK Home Affairs Committee Urges Minimization of Government Data Collection