And get ready for your close-up. Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as federal officials shut down airports and US strategists began plotting a military response, Attorney General John Ashcroft was mobilizing his own forces. In meetings with top aides at the FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center - during which the White House as well as the State and Defense departments dialed in via secure videoconference - Ashcroft pulled together a host of antiterrorism measures.
Days later, the attorney general sent to Capitol Hill a bill that would make it easier for the government to tap cell phones and pagers, give the Feds broad authority to monitor email and Web browsing, strengthen money-laundering laws, and weaken immigrants' rights. There were whispers of a national identity card and of using face-recognition software and retinal scans at airports and in other public spaces.
Such talk usually generates fractious debate between privacy hawks and security hounds. By now, most of us can recite the familiar Nightline arguments and counterarguments. But this time the acrimony has been muted. The terrorist assault on America shifted the balance between privacy and security. What was considered Orwellian one week seemed perfectly reasonable - even necessary - the next. Politicians who routinely clash were marching in lockstep. Almost immediately, there were unmistakable signs that new surveillance tools would be a linchpin in the war on terrorism.
Visionics - a maker of face-recognition software used in surveillance cameras in London and Tampa, Florida, and in the databases of close to a dozen state law enforcement agencies - reported that its switchboards were jammed. The stock prices of some companies in the security business spiked as the rest of the market crumbled. In the name of safety, we have grown increasingly comfortable with cameras monitoring us whenever we stop to buy a Slurpee, grab cash from an ATM, or park in a downtown lot.
And in the name of convenience, we've happily accepted a range of products and services, from cell phones to credit cards to Web browsers that make our lives easier and have the secondary effect of permitting us to be tracked.
They're not spy technologies - but they might as well be. Americans don't seem to be spooked by these incursions. Just how vast is the new surveillance world? Let's start with cameras. More than 60 communities in a dozen states have set up traffic-light cameras that ticket drivers for running red lights or speeding. Casinos in Las Vegas zoom in on the cards we hold at the blackjack table see " Seen City ," page Cameras are mounted on police cars, they hang from trees in public parks, they're affixed to the walls in sports stadiums and shopping malls.
The surveillance net also has a digital arm. With computers home to the data entrails of half a billion bank accounts, just as many credit card accounts, and hundreds of millions of medical claims, mortgages, and retirement funds, there exists a significant cache of online data about each of us. Then there's the matter of monitoring our daily travels. Debit cards like New York's E-ZPass deduct a fee as commuters zip through tollbooths and track our comings and goings on the road; transit cards chart riders' subway journeys; employee ID cards can show when we arrived at work, when we left, and where we went within the office complex.
Phone cards mark who we call and, often, from where. Credit card records etch us in time and space more reliably than any eyewitness. So do airline tickets - even if you pay cash. And as for the cell phone: "If you turn it on, you can be tracked," says Jim Atkinson, a countersurveillance expert who is president of Granite Island Group in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
That means that at any given moment, OnStar can locate each of those 1. OnStar will track a car only at the request of the driver or, in some instances, the police; the company keeps no historical database of car locations, though if it had the inclination - or was pressured - to gather and store reams of data, it could. Mercedes' TeleAid and Ford's Wingcast provide similar services.
For now, the information about each of us resides in dozens of separate databases owned by the credit card companies, the phone carriers, the rental car agencies and police departments, the ISPs and the IRS. But the aftermath of September 11 could change all that by creating in many of us an appetite for information and a willingness to be monitored. And this raises a disquieting possibility: Will the disparate elements of our surveillance society be assembled into a surveillance web?
Will the private companies and the government agencies come together to create a superdatabase accessible to Will it strip us not just of personal privacy - we seem resigned, even OK, with that - but of public anonymity? Worrying is a waste of time. Surveillance is here. It was inevitable. But the surveillance state is not. A few days after September 11, Akram Jaber was driving his Chevy Suburban over the pothole-strewn streets of Chicago's south side.
With his month-old son in the backseat, he was heading to the liquor store he owns to lock up for the night. A battered Chevy Caprice sped by, then stopped in front of him at a red light. Two men emerged; one pointed a gun at Jaber. Take the specific case of a suspected foreign terrorist known to have communicated by phone with U. Litt detailed a litany of privacy safeguards that government sleuths must honor as they investigate the records.
Since the Snowden disclosures, further protections have been suggested. Perhaps the government should employ a team of skilled attorneys, with appropriate security clearances, to argue against the sleuths before the FISA court—to ensure that the judges hear strong arguments against snooping.
While the scope of surveillance today is much broader than in the past, Americans long ago grew accustomed to limits on privacy. The Supreme Court has held that information voluntarily given to third parties is no longer secret, nor can we expect privacy to cloak our actions in public places or our communications via the public airwaves. The header of an e-mail is not so different from the face of an envelope, nor is the signal from a tablet to a wireless router entirely unlike the signal from one radio to another.
We have also learned to trade elements of our privacy for all sorts of supposed benefits. Google tracks our searches so that it will know which advertisements to show us.
Smartphones record our locations to be more helpful in steering us to the nearest multiplex, restaurant, gas station or church. Drugstores analyze our purchases to reward us with coupons redeemable on a future visit. And so on. So far, we have been willing to pay for that intimacy in lost privacy. Which brings us to a strange crossroads. The more technology endangers our privacy, the less we seem to prize it.
We post family photos on social-media sites and ship our credit-card numbers to total strangers. Such steps seem small, however, compared with the rapid rise of surveillance powers and the grim history of governments corrupted by the temptation to watch their peoples too closely.
The admirable goals of public safety and national security have been exploited time and again by intrusive regimes around the world seeking to spy on their critics and smother dissent. Americans need only read the Bill of Rights to see that suspicion of government intrusion is a national birthright. As tools for prying grow in number and strength, this is no time to stop being suspicious. From the photos at Abu Ghraib prison to the avalanche of WikiLeaks documents to the Snowden disclosures, large caches of data have been loaded onto thumb drives or burned onto wafer-thin discs—then spread around the globe in the blink of an eye.
Though the clarions may be prosecuted, the facts they reveal cannot be recalled or repressed. This, ultimately, may prove to be our strongest protection against the rise of the surveillance state. The same tools that strengthen it strengthen those who protest against it. Privacy is not the only illusion in the new age of data; government secrecy is too. Big Brother might be watching, but he is also being watched. Send to Kindle.
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