The following is from a correspondent writing to the politech list from the American Civil Liberties Union.

"This report grew out of our sense here at the ACLU that in order to make
progress on the privacy issue, we have to shift the terms of the
debate. When viewed in isolation, many new privacy invasions seem harmless
to many Americans, who don't see why they should care that (for example)
someone is recording the date and time that they drive through a
tollbooth. To understand the privacy issue one has to look at the big
picture to understand that each new piece of information collected about
us, no matter how seemingly harmless, is increasingly being added together
with thousands of other data points to create an extremely intrusive,
high-resolution picture of our lives.

The need to shift the terms of the debate on privacy to focus more on the
big picture was made a lot easier by the breaking of the story of the
Pentagon/Poindexter Total Information Awareness program and that story has
provided the perfect opportunity to try to spark a broader discussion of
how we are going to handle all the intrusive new technologies that are
being developed, and what we are going to let this country turn into.

The report is available on-line at
http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=11573&c=39."

Regards,

A