How much privacy are we willing to give up to guarantee our security against possible terrorist attacks?

Do we have a choice or has this line already been crossed? Have we become a “Big Brother” society?

Much of our information is already available online to anyone interested in knowing where we live, our age, real estate information, and other personal data.

But far beyond this easy access for the average Web surfer, the US government has been using the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 that allowed government agencies to read our private emails without a password. search warrant.

Emails in transit were protected, but once they reached third-party Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail and were stored, they were no longer protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The outrage created years ago under the Bush administration over warrantless wiretapping was renewed with advocates of civil liberties and Internet rights.

The good news is that on June 18, 2012, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit declared the SCA unconstitutional. He stated that stored emails are secure from government eavesdropping. Because of the ruling, the government has to get a court order to read the stored emails of someone they’re investigating.

Not only emails have been freely available to the government without a court order. Cell phone tracking data is also available for a police investigation.

The American Civil Liberties Union advocacy group has conducted a year-long investigation into law enforcement’s use of cell phone tracking data.

MSNBC reporter Bob Sullivan, an author and writer on tech crime and consumer fraud, reported that using the Freedom of Information Act, the ACLU found that many local police departments across the country routinely pay operators of mobile phone networks a small fee to obtain detailed records of historical information. cell phone location information.

Sullivan said this data tells police not only where a suspect might have been at any given time, but also creates the possibility of tracking someone’s whereabouts for months. In many cases, law enforcement can obtain this information without requesting a search warrant.

Most of the time, Sullivan reported, citations are issued, requiring law enforcement to meet a lower legal standard.

Delving deeper into the use of our personal information that public agencies select, James Bamford, in a Wired magazine article, revealed a top-secret construction project in Utah called the Utah Data Center that is being built for the Security Agency National (NSA). ).

The purpose of this huge center is to intercept, decrypt, analyze and store vast amounts of communications taken from satellite and cable communications.

The source of this information will come from private emails, cell phone calls, Google searches, and personal data trails.

Frankly, I long ago abandoned the idea that my life is private. As for being a writer who researches online, I have to confess that I am a hypocrite when it comes to finding information about people online. I do all kinds of research online for a living, including finding people.

The difference is that I don’t have access to much more than a location and date of birth. This data is like using the old yellow pages.

I ask the question again: Is giving up our privacy the price we pay for keeping ourselves safe from terrorist attacks? Aid?

We may never know which tactic made the difference or missed the mark.

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