ACLU launches surveillance campaign

The release of the report, “The Surveillance-Industrial Complex,” marked the launch of the ACLU’s Surveillance Campaign, which is designed to defend consumers’ personal privacy rights by asking St. Louis-based car rental company Enterprise and 25 other leading retail, banking and travel businesses to take a “no-spy pledge” to reject government requests to voluntarily turn over information on customers and their transactions. The information collected by the ACLU will be available at www.aclu.org/privatize.

“Americans deserve to know just how much sensitive information about their personal lives is being sold or given to the government by the business community,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “We have to insist that companies like Enterprise enact and enforce strong privacy policies, or else we will take our business to companies that may not be so quick to violate our rights and our trust.”

The report documents how the government is piggy-backing on the increasing availability of private-sector data collection to boost its surveillance capabilities. This includes companies that voluntarily furnish data on their customers’ transactions; companies forced to betray their customers through the Patriot Act; data aggregators that compile dossiers on individuals which they sell to the FBI; and individuals who are told to report to the authorities anyone matching frightening but vague descriptions of those who don’t “fit in.”

“It is alarming how advances in technology combined with weak privacy laws and soaring profits are endangering our privacy rights to a point never before seen in our history,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Liberty and Technology Project. “We cannot sit idly by as the growth of a total surveillance society continues.”

In addition to the report, the ACLU also released an online video to illustrate how new technologies and weak privacy laws can be used to reveal sensitive information about a person involved in even the most mundane of business transactions, including ordering a pizza.

In the video, a pizza parlor employee is able to look up a caller’s medical records, employment history, credit card purchases, travel plans, library loans and even the magazines that his wife subscribes to, all with the click of a mouse. At one point, after noticing that the caller recently purchased a pair of 42-inch khakis, the pizza parlor employee suggests he change his order to a sprout submarine combo instead of his usual double meat pizza. The video is available online at: www.aclu.org/ pizza/ index.html.

The report is available online at: www. aclu.org/surveillance.