FAKE War on Terror: Private Companies are Assembling Your Data

Suppose you order a pizza delivered to your home, then discover that your phone call has dispatched a gusher of data about your personal life into your neighborhood pizza parlor. Everything from the last books you checked out of the library to your voting preferences is unleashed. Not to mention some very private purchases you made recently, where you stayed on your latest trips and your not-so-great credit rating. The government and corporations are aggressively collecting information about your personal life and your habits. They want to track your purchases, your medical records, and even your relationships. The Bush Administration's policies, coupled with invasive new technologies, could eliminate your right to privacy completely. Please help us protect our privacy rights and prevent the Total Surveillance Society. Meanwhile, advocates of the anti-terrorism partnership between for-profit businesses and the federal government often justify the incursions as a necessary element in the war against terrorists. Ohio State University business law professor Peter Swire has coined a term for this new alliance: "the security-industrial complex." Thanks to the emergence of new technology, private firms have built the capacity to combine widely scattered public records — divorce proceedings, assessments, traffic violations and so on — with vast amounts of personal financial information. That enables them to assemble dossiers on millions of Americans, then sell the data to interested parties. [more] and [more]

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