Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Ellen Ratner
Rarely a week goes by that we do not hear about a major infringement of privacy in the national news. One of this week's privacy infringement cases highlighted a case in Texas. The privacy breach was cloaked to look like the state was thwarting voter fraud. Now it looks more like the state was intentionally intimidating a volunteer. The plaintiff, Gloria Meeks, has been investigated for helping older voters to vote, (yes, you can get in trouble for helping someone fill out a voter registration card). Ms. Meeks has filed a lawsuit against the state claiming that two state investigators peeped into her bathroom window. The state claimed this did not happen, and that she is a political operative engaged in voter fraud.

In a seemingly unrelated incident this week, the chairwoman of Hewlett-Packard resigned for playing a one-sided game of peek-a-boo with her board members. She and others at Hewlett-Packard authorized a spying operation on board members. The New York Times reports that, ''in addition to direct surveillance, the operation entailed the use of possibly illegal methods to obtain phone records of board members, journalists and others, an attempt to place software on a reporter's computer to track e-mail; and a study of the use of clerical workers and cleaners to infiltrate two news organizations.''

Earlier this year, many of us were astounded to find out that many U.S. citizens' phone conversations were being recorded by the government with the help of publicly traded, responsible to their stockholders, corporations. What is going on here?

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My premise is that we have a ''broken window'' of privacy. The ''broken window'' theory was first put forth by professors James Q. Wilson and George Kelling to explain deteriorating neighborhoods. They postulated that there is a sequence of events that can be expected in deteriorating neighborhoods. ''Incidence of decay (accumulated trash, broken windows, and deteriorated building exteriors) remains in the neighborhood for a reasonably long period of time. People who live and work in the area feel more vulnerable and begin to withdraw. They become less willing to intervene to maintain public areas (e.g. to attempt to break up groups of rowdy teens loitering on street corners) or to address physical signs of deterioration.'' Mayor Giuliani of New York City used this broken window theory to support zero tolerance of crime. Giuliani had a point. He cleaned up the ''broken window'' neighborhoods and crime started to diminish.

The Bush administration, however, is breaking windows, not fixing them. Our government shatters privacy in the name of security. What the government started, the corporations have picked up with a vengeance. The net effect is that Americans don't care. Our attitude is, "Who cares? So many windows are broken, what's one more?"

The problem is, the more windows that are broken, the more will be broken. The examples of privacy rights gone awry are rampant. There are DNA dragnets in certain communities to find criminals. Those who don't participate are often suspect and are under enormous pressure within their communities to participate. There have been collections of consumer data at the Justice Department and at the Pentagon. The Pentagon's ''Total Information Awareness Program'' has supposedly been shut down, but like a Three Stooges episode, when you close one drawer another opens. Seems there is a similar program operating on a state level, The Matrix Program, (The Antiterrorism Information Exchange). So, what the feds are no longer allowed to do has now been farmed out to the states.

The collection of cell phone data is even more disturbing. It is much more than a list of phone calls. Cell phones receive and send data by pinpointing where you are between three cell towers. That data, like phone numbers, is kept by the cell phone companies. They know where you have been, and they keep a record of your cell phone's whereabouts.

Citizens have allowed themselves to become more vulnerable to government and to withdraw their objections because of fear. Fear of terrorism and of crime. As a society we are abdicating our responsibility to monitor the government. Many Americans say, "I don't care if the government monitors my phone records. I don't do anything wrong."

Even if you are comfortable with the government collecting mounds of data on you, are you comfortable with how easy it is for others to access it? Every few months, a major organization is embarrassed by the lost laptop that liberated the private data of tens of thousands of people. Recently it was the Department of Veterans Affairs who potentially compromised the personal data of every vet in the nation. Even the IRS has admitted problems with contractors improperly accessing data. Ever wonder where all that political junk-mail comes from? Somehow both political parties are able to take government census data, private credit card information, voting records and put them together for local and state political parties.

I wouldn't go complaining about this too much to your local politicians. Most of them used that collected data to build their campaign strategy and target specific voters. Asking them for help would be like asking the kid in the neighborhood who broke the window to fix it.