War On Privacy: Where We Stand

Don't get me wrong  the CNN piece you can find here does a great job of covering privacy concerns.  It's well written and square on all counts.

But not to toot our own horn or anything, we've covered 99% of it right here already on Zandar VTS.

We are losing our rights to electronic privacy.  Ambiguous laws and fear tactics have cost us many levels of privacy.  There is a pressure on some services to comply, such as phone companies and Internet providers.  Well, there was right up until they were absolved of all repercussions for complying with a government order.  Now they have no fear of customer reaction, if those customers are even notified.  Right now, we are in danger from our own government thanks to the Patriot Act.  We can be snooped without a warrant, and our correspondence is monitored without or knowledge.

Most of what we do know is thanks to whistle-blowers, activists, academics and a few committed journalists. In 2004, Mark Klein, a technician who had just retired from AT&T, disclosed that in 2003 the National Security Agency built a secret room at the San Francisco facility where he worked, routing all e-mail and phone traffic through it.

Another whistle-blower, Justice Department attorney Thomas Tamm, confirmed that similar interception points were set up around the country to gather and analyze the e-mails and phone calls of Americans who were not suspected of any crime.

While the federal government is required by law to document publicly its wiretapping of phone lines, it is not required to do so with Internet communications. Over 50,000 National Security Letters, a kind of administrative demand letter requiring no probable cause or judicial oversight, are issued each year. Yet we know few details. Companies complying with these secret letters were barred from even informing customers about them until 2009 when Nick Merrill, an entrepreneur who ran a small New York-based Internet service company, successfully enlisted the help of the ACLU in challenging a blanket gag provision of the Patriot Act.

Please read the rest of this article. There is so much information here that we can't afford to forget. My prayer is that Obama made a good choice to put off some battles until his second term, when he can right some serious wrongs (like the Patriot Act).

One final portrait of why Google users should be concerned.  Google can't be held accountable if the government decided to snoop your email.  But it doesn't stop there.  Now they can see your text messages and call logs if you use Google Voice.  Your work can be checked if you use Google Docs. Your pictures through Google+ and Picasa.  Your GPS location if you use Google Maps or Latitude.  Your website information and hidden content can be viewed, including past versions, if you use Google Sites.  Your shopping habits, books you're reading, searches you are running, blogs you are writing, instant messaging and social activities can all be monitored through common Google services.  You can't opt out of this, and once that precedent is set it will fall rapidly across other service providers.  You still don't have to be alerted to the fact, and you can't even be pissed about it until you can prove you were snooped, which you can't.

Well, played, old chap.  Well played.