Our country has a long history of local police, the FBI, and even the CIA spying on American citizens and infiltrating activist groups.
The ACLU was in its infancy when the young J. Edgar Hoover and his staff at the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division were writing the names of hundreds of thousands of suspected radicals on index cards. The various phases of the "Red Scare," the movements for civil rights and black liberation, and the anti-war protests of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, made domestic intelligence gathering a growth industry throughout the 20th century.
But the closing decades of the 20th century have brought something new: the potential for mass surveillance, made possible by the evolution of computer technology. And when the government responded to the attacks of 9/11 by enlisting that technology in the service of national security, the potential became reality.
Since 9/11, the government has directed dramatically expanded powers of surveillance at all of us, not just people suspected of wrongdoing. Our international phone calls, our emails, our financial records, our travel itineraries, and our images captured on digital cameras now swell a mountain of data that is being collected in the name of mining for suspicious patterns and associations.
But while the government has gained more and more power to watch us, it has largely kept us in the dark about what it is doing, building a new architecture of domestic surveillance, about which we know very little.
What must we know if we want to remain a free society? "Sunlight on Surveillance" maps the contours of the emerging Surveillance Society:
• fusion centers;
• "Total Information Awareness"-style data mining programs;
• Department of Homeland Security-funded video surveillance;
• warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency;
• the use being made of PATRIOT Act powers;
• the monitoring of lawful First Amendment activity.
