FAKE War on Terror: Private Companies are Assembling Your Data
Sunday, March 20, 2005 at 01:00PM
TheSpook
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]