Watching You!

Watching You! Systematic Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans by Charlotte Twight

Charlotte Twight's in-depth article in the Fall 1999 issue of The Independent Review offers debaters an excellent introduction to the 2000-2001 national high school debate topic on protecting privacy. The article "Watching You! Systematic Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans" details the amazing degree that the federal government invades personal privacy. Twight, a professor of economics at Boise State University, begins with this chilling scenario: "Imagine for a moment a nation whose central government mandated ongoing collection of detailed personal information-individually identified-recording each citizen's employment, income, childhood and subsequent educational experiences, medical history (including doctors' subjective impressions), financial transactions (including copies of personal checks written), ancestry, living conditions (including bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom facilities), rent or mortgage payment, household expenses, roommates and their characteristics, in-home telephone service, automobile ownership, household heating and sewage systems, number of stillbirths, language capability-and periodically even demanded to know what time each person in the household usually left home to go to work during the previous week. Imagine further that such a government assigned every citizen a central government identification number at birth and mandated its use in reporting the information just listed. Suppose the same government were actively considering mandatory nationwide use of a "biometric identifier" (such as fingerprints or retinal scans) along with a new counterfeit-proof permanent government identification card incorporating the individual's government-issued number and other personal information, through magnetic strips and embedded computer chips capable of holding up to sixteen hundred pages of information about the individual. If a contemporary novelist were to portray the emergence of such a government in America, his novel undoubtedly would be regarded as futuristic fiction in the same vein as George Orwell's 1984." And even more amazing, Twight continues: "Yet this national portrait is no longer fiction. The model for the foregoing description is a government that now wields exactly those awesome powers over the citizenry- America's federal government in 1999. [In the full version of this article in The Independent Review] I substantiate each of the preceding statements and provide citations to the laws, regulations, and working papers establishing and designing such intelligence systems." To see the full text of this important article, which includes the full documentation Twight promises, visit the web site of The Independent Institute (www.independent.org). The article is at: http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/TIR42.html Also recommended, by the way, is an Independent Review article from the Spring, 2000 issue by David Henderson, "Information Technology as a Universal Solvent for Removing State Stains". It's Web location is: www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/TIR44Henderson.html (Subscriptions to the Independent Review are $27.95/year (individual) & $83.95/year (institutional). info@independent.org; www.independent.org.)