ACLU: It's Almost 1984 

Big Brother is watching you. The American Civil Liberties Union is quite sure of it.

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An ACLU report released Wednesday warns that the United States "has now reached the point where a total 'surveillance society' has become a realistic possibility."

The problem, said ACLU analysts, is twofold: Increasingly sophisticated technologies make advanced surveillance a snap, while the erosion of constitutional protections in the wake of Sept. 11 threatens the legal safeguards shielding Americans from excessive government snooping.

"Given the capabilities of today's technology, the only thing protecting us from a full-fledged surveillance society are the legal and political institutions we have inherited as Americans," said Barry Steinhart, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, who co-authored the report. "Unfortunately, the Sept. 11 attacks have led some to embrace the fallacy that weakening the Constitution will strengthen America."

The ACLU described its report, "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of the American Surveillance Society," as an attempt to "step back from the daily march of stories about new surveillance programs and technologies and (to) survey the bigger picture."

Overzealous government snoops are not the only target of the report. Its authors also condemned the increasing amount of prying being done by the private sector, which compiles vast amounts of personal information in the pursuit of marketing and sales goals. A lot of that data has a habit of winding up in more official, sinister hands, the report said.

According to Dorothy Ehrlich, the ACLU's Northern California director, the only thing standing between Americans and a full-fledged Big Brother society is sheer incompetence. Inefficiency prevents the new technologies from realizing their full potential, she said.

"Eventually, businesses and government agencies will settle on standards for tying together information, and gain the ability to monitor many of our activities," Ehrlich said, "either directly through surveillance cameras, or indirectly by analyzing the information trails we leave behind us as we go through life."

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