American Civil Liberties Union

Our government lost its way after 9/11 in many different respects. One of them was to worsen what had already been long apparent as one of the most significant problems with our security establishment: its out-of-control habit of secrecy.

The secrecy problem had been studied and decried for decades before 9/11, with nearly every government panel, commission, and committee that examined the issue concluding that the amount of information kept secret was far out of proportion to what was justifiable, and was harming our nation.

The advertising industry continues to mount a strong attack on the Do Not Track concept for protecting online privacy. As my colleague Chris Calabrese described last week, the industry threw an “epic hissy fit” (in the words of Ed Bott at ZDNet) over Microsoft’s laudable decision to turn on Do Not Track by default in Internet Explorer.

On July 30, the Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia announced a review of license plate scanning programs by law enforcement in the province. If the United States had an analogous institution embodying /enforcing our privacy values, maybe we’d see something like that here instead of untrammeled expansion and retention of license data. We’re still waiting for the “missing in action” Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to turn into something real. From 2007 until late 2011, neither President Bush nor President Obama even nominated anyone to fill the independent oversight board; we finally now have four members—but still no chair.

In a prior post I alluded to the fact that the buzzword “Big Data” is just a new term for “data mining.” The potential for big data analytics to discover new things about us is frightening from a privacy perspective, as I discussed. But, it can also be—let’s be honest—very cool.