American Civil Liberties Union

The Bipartisan Policy Center published a report last week called, “Countering Online Radicalization in America,” which strongly endorsed First Amendment principles in rejecting censorship as an appropriate tactic for addressing violent extremist content on the Internet.  The report evaluated the many methods governments around the world use to censor the Internet – including filtering or blacklisting online content, taking down websites (either through legal means, cyber attacks or appealing to private sector providers), and prosecuting Internet content producers – and rejected them all as both ineffective in stopping the spread of undesirable ideas, and an affront to American values: “For the United States, the cost-benefit analysis would be even clearer:  with its long and cherished tradition of free speech, the creation of a nationwide system of censorship is virtually inconceivable.”  But the BPC’s positive recommendations are potentially undermined by its continuing embrace of a radicalization theory that draws too close a causal connection between “radical” ideas and violent action.

Yesterday I wrote about receiving a robo-call that was so slickly done I didn’t even realize I was talking to a computer for several minutes. I mulled over whether the use of such technology raises any serious privacy or other ethical issues. Not really, I decided—at least that I could see.

In September I wrote about how policymakers often act on privacy issues only when they themselves feel their privacy personally threatened—for example when Robert Bork’s video rental records were obtained by a reporter. Now Peter Maass, writing in the New Yorker and ProPublica, is raising a key question about the Petraeus scandal: will lawmakers sit up and take notice of how easily the CIA Director’s private emails were discovered? Will they “start worrying a bit more about becoming the next Petraeus or Bork”? It may well be true that the discovery of an affair by an FBI agent would not have led to anything had the subject been an ordinary person, but because Petraeus was in such an important role, the finding kept getting passed around because nobody dared to take the responsibility of doing nothing about it. And inevitably, it eventually leaked. As Maass astutely observes, “the Petraeus case shows that among the people who have the most to lose from unchecked surveillance are the people who thought they would benefit from it—government elites.”

In the digital age that we live in today, we are constantly exposing our personal information online. From using cell phones and GPS devices to online shopping and sending e-mail, the things we do and say online leave behind ever-growing trails of personal information. The ACLU believes that Americans shouldn’t have to choose between using new technology and keeping control of your private information. Each week, we feature some of the most interesting news related to technology and civil liberties that we’ve spotted from the previous week.