Big Brother, Only Sneakier

At least in the novel 1984, Big Brother had telescreens in everyone's homes, so they knew they were under surveillance. The Washington Post reports:

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.

So, for example, your bank balance and transaction history, the last books you bought at Barnes & Noble, and the details of who you called on the phone, could already be in a government database. So could all of the bank records, and book buying, and telephone calls of everyone you called. It could all be in there in perpetuity, and available to share with Choicepoint, or other outstanding private companies. You don't even know about it, and won't. You can't, in fact. If you go to ask, the government doesn't have to tell you, and anyone they asked for information is legally blocked from telling you anything.

At this point, the strongest barrier to being included in these databases is that they take up terrabytes of storage, and accumulating it takes time. But storage is getting cheaper all the time. And the argument for knowing more will always be tempting.

You may think you are safe because you have nothing to do with terrorism. But at a rate of over 30,000 letters a year, they've got to be accumulating a lot of unrelated data. Imagine playing "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon", and substitute "an Arab-American" for Kevin Bacon, and allow connections such as "checked out a book at the same library one day", "once called a store where someone worked", or "once wrote a check to buy Girl Scout cookies from the daughter of". You can't possibly know if you are connected.

But they do. And they always will.