The Surveillance Industrial Complex : How the American Government is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society

Acting under the broad mandate of the «war» on terrorism, the U.S. security establishment is making a systematic effort to extend its surveillance capacity by pressing the private sector into service to report on the activities of Americans. These efforts, which are often costly to private businesses, run the gamut from old-fashioned efforts to recruit individuals as eyes and ears for the authorities, to the construction of vast computerized networks that automatically feed the government a steady stream of information about our activities.

Public-private surveillance is not new. During the Cold War, for example, the major telegraph companies - Western Union, RCA and ITT - agreed to provide the federal government with copies of all cables sent to or from the United States every day - even though they knew it was illegal. The program, codenamed «Operation Shamrock,» continued for decades, coming to an end only with the intelligence scandals of the 1970s.

But even such flagrant abuses as Operation Shamrock pale in comparison to the emergence of an information-age «surveillance-industrial complex.» The ongoing revolution in communications, computers, databases, cameras and sensors means that the technologicalobstacles to the creation of a truly nightmarish «surveillance society» have now been overcome. And even as this dangerous new potential emerges, our legal and constitutional protections against such intrusion have been eroded to a frightening degree in recent years through various court rulings as well as laws like the Patriot Act.

The ACLU has documented the confluence of these two trends in a separate report. But there is a third crucial obstacle that the American security establishment is seeking to overcome in its drive to access ever more information about ever more people. That obstacle is the practical limits on the resources, personnel and organization needed to extend the government’s surveillance power to cover hundreds of millions of people. There will always be limits to the number of personnel that the U.S. security state can directly hire, and to the «ratio of watchers to watched.» This is the obstacle that the U.S. security establishment seeks to overcome by enlisting individuals and corporations as auxiliary members of its surveillance networks.

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ACLU - Surveillance Industrial Complex