Security vs. privacy.

AuthorParsons, Dan

* The U.S. government today has greater access than ever before to the private lives of citizens, but this snooping goes largely unchallenged because technology allows the intrusions to be almost imperceptible.

Though it has been brought starkly to light as a result of intelligence leaks, the government will likely peer ever deeper into the lives of all Americans in an effort to stave off future threats to national security, experts agreed. And technological advances could make this unprecedented surveillance nearly undetectable.

"It's never been so unobtrusive. It's never been so invisible," John Pike, director of the Globalsecurity.org think tank, said of the domestic surveillance programs revealed in recent months. "Most people just don't think about it, even though the reality has been broadcast far and wide. It's reassuringly amazing, that despite some people hollering about government intrusion, it doesn't feel oppressive."

As technology further develops and the government's capacity for collecting and storing metadata increases, privacy of communication likely will continue to erode--an undemocratic reality revisited often in literature.

In George Orwell's "1984," every room in every home was equipped with a "telescreen," a two-way television that broadcasted incessant pro-regime propaganda and captured video of citizens' daily lives for the government.

Though officials had unfettered access to their lives, Orwell's protagonists were at least temporarily able to subvert the "Ministry of Love" because there simply were not enough bureaucratic minders to review that much footage.

Technology has allowed the U.S. government to overcome that problem. Computers now have the ability to review every bit of data the National Security Agency vacuums from the airwaves and Internet, Pike said.

In the actual year of 1984, the German Democratic Republic's secret police, the infamous Stasi, had 10 percent of its entire population informing on their fellow citizens and they still had a hard time keeping track of subversives, Pike said. A dozen years into the nationwide program of information gathering that resulted from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States has a degree of pervasive police surveillance that the Stasi or Orwell's Ministry of Love could never have achieved, Pike said.

The U.S. government has the tools to ferret out and counter almost any terror plot that is discussed on the telephone or in electronic communication, Pike said...

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