[LINK] Countdown to Surveillance Society: A New ACLU Initiative

[Roger Clarke]

[Email from Barry Steinhardt, President of ACLU - the American Civil 
Liberties Union, headquartered in NY:  http://www.aclu.org ]

Dear Roger,

I wanted to let you know about a new ACLU initiative built around a 
"<http://www.aclu.org/clock>Surveillance Society Clock."  The clock 
has been designed to dramatize our headlong rush toward the 
destruction of privacy in America - the dark "midnight" of a total 
surveillance society where our every action and utterance is tracked, 
recorded, correlated and analyzed.

It has been set to 11:54 PM -- 6 minutes before midnight. We will be 
changing it as circumstances warrant, just like the Cold War 
"Doomsday Clock" run by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which 
inspired ours.  (You could say that every generation gets the clock 
it deserves.)

We have also released a new report, a timeline, and a video -- as 
well as Web buttons like the one below that will show the current 
Clock time at any given moment.  We're trying to spread this around 
the Internet as much as possible.

Further details are below in a blog that I published on Huffington 
Post yesterday.

Please let me know if you would like to know more about this campaign 
or would like to participate.

Thank you so much,

Barry Steinhardt


Director Technology and Liberty Program
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
1 202 675 2332 (office)
1 917 412  7139 (mobile)
__________________________________________________________________________

A Midnight of Lost Privacy
Posted September 17, 2007 | 09:28 AM (EST)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barry-steinhardt/a-midnight-of-lost-privac_b_64488.html

What's happening to America? We are fast approaching a total 
surveillance society - a "midnight" of lost privacy. And it's only 
six minutes before the hour.

How is this happening? First there's the technology. We've got RFID 
tags, biometrics, DNA, data mining, surveillance cameras -- even spy 
satellites trained on Americans. We're all living our lives more and 
more electronically, making everyone easier and easier to track -- 
and our security agencies aren't being shy about taking advantage of 
the fact.

About the only thing happening faster than the development of 
technology for spying on people is the speed with which our privacy 
laws have been dismantled in the past seven years.

Add to that the "war on terror" -- a permanent, standing 
justification for every intrusive power grab our security agencies 
can dream up -- a president who claims "inherent authority" to ignore 
the law, and big corporations that are happy to be part of a new 
surveillance industrial complex -- and it all adds up to a pretty 
pretty ominous situation.

At the ACLU we're doing what we can to scream and moan about this. 
It's hard, because the media likes to pay attention to the latest 
sexy gadget or spy story -- but they rarely step back to look at the 
big picture of how all these trends are working together to bring 
about a genuine shift in American life.

One of the things we're doing to dramatize this situation is 
introducing a "Surveillance Clock" -- a graphical dramatization of 
just how close we are getting to the midnight of a true surveillance 
society.

Americans above a certain age probably remember the Bulletin of 
Atomic Scientists' "Doomsday Clock." Created in 1947 and used 
throughout the Cold War, the Doomsday Clock dramatized the threat of 
nuclear war by moving its hands closer or further away from 
"midnight" as the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets ebbed and 
flowed.

Thankfully, the Doomsday clock never reached midnight.

These days we have new worries. On our Surveillance Clock, the time 
is 11:54. And the seconds are blinking by.

Along with the clock, we've also released a couple of other items:

* A new report, "Even Bigger, Even Weaker: The Emerging Suveillance 
Society: Where are We Now?" This is an update to a previous ACLU 
report, "Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains, which we released in 2003 and 
which attracted a huge amount of attention at the time. In that 
report, we basically said, "hey everybody, we're now at the point 
where a total surveillance society is technologically possible - and 
we don't seem to be doing very well at controlling that technology by 
strengthening our laws - in fact we're weakening them."

* A video of "Monster Among Us," a new piece written and performed by 
the talented spoken-word artists Steve Connell & Sekou (tha misfit). 
The piece is another way we're trying to dramatize the growing 
surveillance society, especially for a youth audience.

* A timeline of surveillance technologies and policies, which shows 
just how fast the development of such technologies has accelerated in 
recent years. We are also inviting visitors to help us fill out the 
timeline by contributing items we have missed.

Our news culture is definitely built around the headline -- the 
sudden and the sexy. As fast as we're headed toward a surveillance 
society, it's not something that happens in one tragic moment that 
takes over cable television for three days. But it's no less real, 
and amounts to massive shift in power between individuals and the 
security agencies. Whether the ACLU and our allies who are concerned 
about this trend can succeed in breaking through the din, will have 
to be seen. But we're trying.


-- 
Roger Clarke                  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/
			            
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Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW