Re: [privacy] Clock to tick down U.S. privacy

["Larry Seltzer" <Larry () larryseltzer com>]

Exactly as the article says, it's like the Doomsday nuclear war clock
which also overstated matters.

Larry Seltzer
eWEEK.com Security Center Editor
http://security.eweek.com/
http://blogs.eweek.com/cheap_hack/
Contributing Editor, PC Magazine
larry.seltzer () ziffdavisenterprise com

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard M. Smith [mailto:rms () computerbytesman com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 11:07 AM
To: privacy () whitestar linuxbox org
Subject: [privacy] Clock to tick down U.S. privacy

http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070918/NATION/109180049/1002

A "Surveillance Society Clock" created by the American Civil Liberties
Union will symbolize the encroachment of government spying on private
citizens as part of the war against terrorism - and the ticktock is fast
approaching midnight.

"The extinction of privacy is a real possibility," said Barry
Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "We
believe that privacy is not yet dead - it is a patient on life support."

The online clock is patterned after the "Doomsday Clock," created by the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 to warn against a nuclear
holocaust. Midnight symbolized a total "1984"-style "surveillance
society."

"Every generation deserves its own clock," Mr. Steinhardt said in a
teleconference yesterday announcing the project and a new report on mass
surveillance by the government.

He said that an explosive increase in new technology and data mining is
fueling the trend and creating a false sense of security - from
satellites to national-identity systems, the National Security Agency's
warrantless surveillance program, DNA data-banking and Web search
engines that store every query, even satellites.

"The false security of a surveillance society threatens to turn our
country into a place where individuals are constantly susceptible to
being trapped by data errors or misinterpretations, illegal use of
information by rogue government workers, abuses by political leaders -
or perhaps most insidiously, expanded legal uses of information for all
kinds of new purposes," the report says.

"We are far too close to the midnight of a genuine surveillance society,
and the second hand has not stopped sweeping around the dial," the
report says.

The "surveillance" clock, a digital display viewable from the ACLU's Web
site, is now set at six minutes before midnight. The ACLU says it will
be updated as events warrant moving the time closer or further away from
a "surveillance society."

...


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