The FBI is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.It is probably safe to say that if you have attended a political protest in the last nine years or if you are politically active in the areas of environmental awareness or antiwar issues or if you are an active blogger who criticizes the American security organs, you're in the FBI's database. If you have taken a photo of a ferry boat or a police car or a train, you might be in the database. If you have ever walked into a mosque, you're very likely in the database. If you have had a traffic ticket in the last several years, you're in the database. Hell, apparently if you live in Colorado and you play World of Warcraft online, you could be in the database.
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2 comments:
I saw an episode of Law & Order not too long ago where they used a private database to locate someone, and a little light went on in my brain. There is all this fuss and chatter about whether the government can keep track of people, but there isn't any control over private databases, they can accumulate any kind of information they want, and if you can sell that information to the governement you've got a heck of a business model.
Indeed. And people go along with it with company-specific "affinity" programs that track people's purchases.
The only way I know of to defeat the corporate data collection is to buy as much as possible in cash, anonymously.
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