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09/30/2007: "Big Brother creeps in slowly"

The Economist has been running a series on Civil Liberties, and the second in the series named Learning to live with Big Brother takes on the role of technology in eroding our privacy with surveillance technology, and more insidiously, profiling technology. Excellent summary of all the various ways you (and I really mean you, the reader) are being tracked. Warrantless wiretapping, DNA, Data Mining, RFID, almost everything is mentioned, along with one of the best analogies about our situation I've ever heard:

"Ross Anderson, a professor at Cambridge University in Britain, has compared the present situation to a "boiled frog" . which fails to jump out of the saucepan as the water gradually heats. If liberty is eroded slowly, people will get used to it. He added a caveat: it was possible the invasion of privacy would reach a critical mass and prompt a revolt."
The first in the series, Is torture ever justified? which is worth glancing at just for the graph showing around 47% of Americans agreeing that "some degree of torture is permissible." Be sure and check the text immediately to the right of the graph for a classic Cheney no-brainer."

http://economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9867324