May 18, 2006 | Sex & Society

Big Brother gets snoopier

Democratic governments are supposed to protect civil liberties, but the United States government seems to have forgotten this principle. Just look at the National Security Agency's (NSA) domestic spy program, which has been secretly amassing data about Americans' domestic phone calls in order to "fight terrorism."

Just like in George Orwell's famed novel, "1984," Big Brother seems to be growing ever more powerful in the United States, according to USA Today. The newspaper broke the news last week that the NSA has been secretly collecting millions of Americans' phone records, allegedly provided by AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon.

In December, The New York Times reported that the NSA had been conducting electronic surveillance on calls and e-mails to and from foreign countries. USA Today, however, reports that the program includes surveillance of communications within the United States, too, despite direct assurance from President Bush that domestic calls remained private, and despite the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

Some carriers have admitted to providing customer data to the government while others have not commented or have denied the allegations. Qwest is one telecom that appears to have refused the government's request for cooperation.

As if spying on your phone calls weren't enough, CNET News reports that a prominent Congressman also wants to spy on your web browsing. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) plans to introduce legislation this week to change Internet privacy laws to require Internet Service Providers to keep logs of users' online activity. The legislation would create a federal felony to punish bloggers, search engines and webmasters who law enforcement "have reason to believe" facilitate access to child pornography.

But how can citizens believe that the government will use the data it is collecting on their  previously private activities to only fight the evils of  terrorism and child porn. How can anyone trust an administration that has repeatedly misled the citizenry, dragged the country into a unjustified and un-winnable war and consistently ignored Constitutional limitations on Presidential powers? At what point does the trade-off of individual liberty for "security" become untenable?

Amassing data on the telephone and web surfing activities of the citizenry may help to fight terrorism and child porn -- but it can also potentially help track down any individual or group that is deemed by the NSA or the government of the day to be "undesirable." Maybe we're just being paranoid -- or maybe we're just reading the writing on the wall.

• NSA has massive database of American's phone calls [USA Today]
• NSA's data mining explained [CNET News]
• Congress may make ISPs snoop on you [CNET News]
• The ultimate Net monitoring tool [Wired]