American Civil Liberties Union

An amazing video posted on The New York Times website today lays out in chilling detail how the National Security Agency is sucking up every piece of communication data in America – from phone calls to emails to cell phone location – and has the ability to tie together all of the information for a single person (watch it here).

You shouldn’t have to trade your privacy rights for the ability to use digital technology. But with technological advances coming so quickly, privacy protections are having trouble keeping up. That’s why the ACLU created the dotRights campaign – to let Americans know about what’s really going on with digital privacy, and to press corporations and the government to respect our rights.

You might switch off the GPS function on your cell phone – but that doesn’t mean that your wireless carrier can’t still track your location, store it for long periods, and hand it over to the government on request (it can and does). You might think that you control who can see what you do on the internet – but tightening your Facebook privacy settings or deleting your browser’s tracking cookies won’t change the fact that your online activities are being recorded and sold for profit to the highest bidder.

The next time you send an email or make a phone call to a friend outside the country, consider this: the National Security Agency could be making a copy of your communication and storing it.