http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070918/NATION/109180049/1002 A "Surveillance Society Clock" created by the American Civil Liberties Union will symbolize the encroachment of government spying on private citizens as part of the war against terrorism - and the ticktock is fast approaching midnight. "The extinction of privacy is a real possibility," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "We believe that privacy is not yet dead - it is a patient on life support." The online clock is patterned after the "Doomsday Clock," created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 to warn against a nuclear holocaust. Midnight symbolized a total "1984"-style "surveillance society." "Every generation deserves its own clock," Mr. Steinhardt said in a teleconference yesterday announcing the project and a new report on mass surveillance by the government. He said that an explosive increase in new technology and data mining is fueling the trend and creating a false sense of security - from satellites to national-identity systems, the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program, DNA data-banking and Web search engines that store every query, even satellites. "The false security of a surveillance society threatens to turn our country into a place where individuals are constantly susceptible to being trapped by data errors or misinterpretations, illegal use of information by rogue government workers, abuses by political leaders - or perhaps most insidiously, expanded legal uses of information for all kinds of new purposes," the report says. "We are far too close to the midnight of a genuine surveillance society, and the second hand has not stopped sweeping around the dial," the report says. The "surveillance" clock, a digital display viewable from the ACLU's Web site, is now set at six minutes before midnight. The ACLU says it will be updated as events warrant moving the time closer or further away from a "surveillance society." ... ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE