Surveillance devices

Surveillance devices now in the hands of government and corporate officials include, according to MIT professor Gary Marx, "heat sensing imaging devices that can tell if a house is occupied, voice amplifiers, light amplifying night vision devices and techniques for reading mail without breaking the seal." Cameras can be hidden in virtually any piece of furniture.

The Olivetti corporation is now marketing its "active badge" to employers -- a tiny device employees would affix to their clothes, emitting a an infrared pulse every 15 seconds. The pulse is picked up by sensors throughout the workplace and processed through a central computer, allowing managers to ascertain the precise whereabouts of any employee at any time.

On any given day more than 4,000 phone calls are legally tapped by authorities. No one can be sure, but illegal telephone eavesdropping by corporations and other private bodies may exceed that number by a factor of 10.

The National Security Agency tape records every international phone call placed in to or out of the United States. Technically, monitoring domestic phone calls is against the law, but the NSA monitors all microwave transmissions which is legal -- and a huge number of long distance phone calls are now beamed by microwave transmission.

While faxes were the with-it communications gimmick of the '80s the '90s are the e-mail decade. But the newly popular cyber-missives are even more susceptible to prying. Within the workplace, e-mail is completely devoid of legal safeguards. Your messages are company property.

In April, 1995, Great Britain opened up the world's first DNA database. By the end of the century, 5 million Brits are supposed to have their genetic codes in the Home Office master computer. Under the current law, only convicted criminals get a DNA database listing, but in Clockwork Orange fashion, there are those in the British government who want the system expanded to collect records from citizens who not only haven't been convicted, but who have no arrest record at all.

A recent survey by Macworld magazine found that 22 percent of CEOs and other top managers acknowledged snooping around in their employees' e-mail, voice mail and computer files. The magazine extrapolated from those results, and figured that up to 20 million Americans are being spied on electronically by their bosses while on the job.

Electronic workplace surveillance has become so commonplace that many networking software packages have worker-monitoring features such as keystroke monitoring built in nowadays. "Look in on Sue's computer screen," exhorted one ad for a major networking package. "Sue doesn't even know you're there!"
The United States has the world's most extensive system of computer databases of personal information on citizens. The information is collected for purposes ranging from monitoring criminals to credit reporting to demographic resaerch for product marketers andeverything in between. The types of personal information collected on millions of Americans and stored in databases includes the basics like names and addresses as well as more intimate information such as medical records, psychological profiles, drinking habits and political affiliations.

Some of the largest collectors of such data are credit reporting agencies, private bureaus that advise prospective lenders on customers' creditworthiness. Even under the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970, ostensibly designed to protect the privacy of people who want to borrow money (a group which includes almost every American these days) individuals have no right or means to find out where their files are kept unless their credit is denied, nor does the subject of a credit report have any right to see the actual report even thiug it contains extremely personal financial information. The law, however, places no real limit on who else can gain access to credit files.

According to a government study, only about one-quarter of all records in the FBI's database of criminal histories were complete and accurate. Thousands of Americans are at risk of false arrest because of this shortcoming.
The State of California keeps records on more people in its criminal information system than there are people in California.

In 1989 it was revealed that the FBI ran a "library surveillance program," attempting to ascertain the political bent of library users by monitoring the books they check out. When some librarians blew the whistle on the program, the FBI investigated them.

In 1990, the Internal Revenue Service seized people's personal property in %125 more cases than a decade earlier, even though delinquent tax cases were up just %32. Under the inaptly named "Taxpayer Bill of Rights," the IRS is allowed to seize all but $1,650 worth of your personal property. There is only one body that handles appeals in such cases -- the IRS itself.

As mandatory drug testing grips the world of corporate and government employment, methods to fool the standard urine test detection method have become well-known. To combat this trend, some companies have turned to the more reliable method of hair testing. Hair maintains a permanent and unalterable record of all drugs an individual ingests. While urine tests catch only those drugs in a subjects system at the time of urination, missing those consumed any time prior to a few days before the test, hair grows at the rate of about one-half inch per month. A person's history of drug indulgence is therefore as easy to read as his or her hair is long. But head hair is far from the only source for that information. Body hair and fingernails also do the trick. Boasts Psychemedics, one of the field's leaders, "Cocaine taken one day can be detected in beard stubble the following day." In other words, don't shave in the company men's room.

With such methods for identifying people as blood typing, semen analaysis and fingerprinting apparently not reliable enough, law enforcement agencies are turning to analysis of DNA, an individual's genetic code, to make identifications.

Between 1978 and 1984 the FBI and other federal agencies tripled the amount of private mail they opened and read or inspected for "national security" reasons. Between 1980 and 1984 the government doubled its requests for elecronic surveillances. Federal agencies must apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before placing a subject under electronic surveillance, but the court had never denied a request as of the end of the Reagan administration.

The U.S. Customs Service plans a computer system that would classify incoming airline passengers as "high risk" or "low risk" based on information supplied by airlines. The purpose is supposedly to speed up lines at customs counters. "Americans are supposed to be free people. There's not supposed to be records made when you travel," said a skeptical U.S. Representative Don Edwards. "The minute you get your name and birth date into a computer in Washington, watch out."

It is a policy of the United States Navy to collect DNA samples on all new recruits. That is an approximate 55,000 DNA samples collected each year. And the comic book idea of genetically engineering a "Super Soldier" doesn't seem so far fetched.
This information can be verified by contacting any Public Affairs office affiliated with the United States Navy.

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