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New Report Shows Government Using Businesses to Collect Personal Data
ST LOUIS- The U.S. security establishment is rapidly increasing its
ability to monitor average Americans by hiring or compelling
private-sector corporations to provide billions of customer records,
according to a report released today by the American Civil Liberties
Union.
The release of the report, 'The Surveillance-Industrial Complex',
marked the launch of the ACLU's Surveillance Campaign, which is
designed to defend consumers' personal privacy rights by asking St.
Louis -based Enterprise and 25 other leading retail, banking and travel
businesses to take a "no-spy pledge"
to reject government requests to voluntarily turn over information on
customers and their transactions. The information collected by
the ACLU will be available at www.aclu.org/privatize.
"Americans deserve to know just how much sensitive information about
their personal lives is being sold or given to the government by the
business community," said Matt LeMieux, Eastern Missouri Director of
the ACLU. "We have to insist that companies like Enterprise enact
and enforce strong privacy policies, or else we will take our business
to companies that may not be so quick to violate our rights and our
trust."
The report documents how the government is piggy-backing on the
increasing availability of private-sector data collection to boost its
surveillance capabilities. This ranges from companies that
voluntarily furnish data on their customers' transactions to those
forced to betray their customers through the Patriot Act, to data
aggregators that compile dossiers on individuals which they sell to the
FBI, to individuals who are told to report to the authorities anyone
matching frightening but vague descriptions of those who don't "fit
in."
"It is alarming how advances in technology combined with weak privacy
laws and soaring profits are endangering our privacy rights to a point
never before seen in our history," said Barry Steinhardt, director of
the ACLU's Liberty and Technology Project. "We cannot sit idly by
as the growth of a total surveillance society continues."
In addition to the report, the ACLU also released an online video to
illustrate how new technologies and weak privacy laws can be used to
reveal sensitive information about a person involved in even the most
mundane of business transactions, including ordering a pizza.
In the video, a pizza parlor employee is able look up a caller's
medical records, employment history, credit card purchases, travel
plans, library loans and even the magazines that his wife subscribes
to, all with the click of a mouse. At one p point, after noticing that
the caller recently purchased a pair of 42-inch khakis, the parlor
employee suggests he change his order to a "sprout submarine combo"
instead of his usual double meat pizza. The video is available online
at: http://www.aclu.org/pizza/index.html.
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