Topic: Choicepoint

FISA isn’t the worst of it

February 25, 2008 |

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is just the latest salvo in an attempt to install a surveillance society in America. Don’t let anger at the Bush administration and Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) over the NSA blind you to a much larger problem. We need a comprehensive national policy on data collection and its use in both the public & private sectors. Privacy rights and the associated laws must be clarified and strengthened, taking into account the complexities of modern technologies. The wall between government and private industry must also be restored.

Theoretically, U.S. laws and policies restrict the government’s use of dossiers on individual citizens who are not under criminal investigation. President Carter’s Executive order 12036 prohibited domestic surveillance. There are no such laws preventing private companies from doing so, as long as they ensure that specific protected pieces of data (your social security number, for example) aren’t lost or stolen or otherwise compromised. And some people in the intelligence community have been trying to get their hands on that commercial data for years. «Read the rest of this article»

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