Big Business Becoming Big Brother.
/The government is increasingly using
corporations to do its surveillance work, allowing it to get around
restrictions that protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans,
according to a report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties
Union, an organization that works to protect civil liberties. Data
aggregators -- companies that aggregate information from numerous
private and public databases -- and private companies that collect
information about their customers are increasingly giving or selling
data to the government to augment its surveillance capabilities and
help it track the activities of people. Because laws that restrict
government data collection don't apply to private industry, the
government is able to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance.
Congress needs to close such loopholes, the ACLU said, before the
exchange of information gets out of hand. [more]
- Last year, JetBlue Airways acknowledged that it secretly gave defense contractor Torch Concepts 5 million passenger itineraries for a government project on passenger profiling without the consent of the passengers. The contractor augmented the data with passengers' Social Security numbers, income information and other personal data to test the feasibility of a screening system called CAPPS II.
