Big Business Becoming Big Brother The government is increasingly using corporations to do its surveillance work, allowing it to get around restrictions that protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, according to a report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that works to protect civil liberties. Data aggregators — companies that aggregate information from numerous private and public databases — and private companies that collect information about their customers are increasingly giving or selling data to the government to augment its surveillance capabilities and help it track the activities of people. Because laws that restrict government data collection don’t apply to private industry, the government is able to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance. Congress needs to close such loopholes Federal law enforcement have sent watch lists to corporations containing names of individuals that were not under official investigation or wanted, but that the agency just had an interest in. We already know that some of these agencies are targeting and harassing citizens. Would it not be reasonable to conclude that they are misusing this resource as well?
Big Business Becoming Big Brother Wired NewsWire 02:00 AM Aug, 09, 2004 EDT, By Kim Zetter The ACLU released the Surveillance-Industrial Complex report to educate the public about how information collected from them is being used. The report notes that there is no way to determine how many job applicants might have been denied work because their names appeared on the list. “It turns companies into sheriff’s deputies, responsible not just for feeding information to the government, but for actually enforcing the government’s wishes,