Minding your business: partnerships in snooping.

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Citings - Brief Article

FROM THE 1940S through the '70s, the major telegraph companies voluntarily gave the government copies of all cables sent to or from the U.S. as part of an illegal project caned Operation Shamrock. According to "The Surveillance-Industrial Complex," a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union, something similar is afoot today.

More and more, Washington is using private-sector intermediaries to circumvent the Fourth Amendment's restrictions on the information its agents can directly gather. While public opposition killed the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), which would have recruited private citizens to be the government's eyes and ears, a plethora of smaller programs are attempting the same thing with neighborhood watch groups, real estate agents, truck...