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Surveillance industrial complex emerges { August 11 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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ACLU urges pressure on data-gathering
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Angela D. Chatman
Plain Dealer Reporter
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio is urging citizens to pressure state elected officials not to participate in the broad-based collection of data on individuals.
It also is calling on citizens to write to corporations and ask about their privacy policies and to urge them not to turn over data on individuals to government agencies, said Carrie Davis, the Cleveland-based group's staff attorney.
"We want to get individual citizens to stand up for their rights," she said Tuesday.
Federal law prohibits the federal government from investigating or conducting surveillance on people who are not suspected of committing a crime.
But the national ACLU issued a report Monday raising concerns that the federal government increasingly is involving private citizens and corporations in its information gathering.
"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," says the report, "The Surveillance-Industrial Complex."
The report concludes that the government is sidestepping the law by encouraging and sponsoring citizen watch groups and obtaining data that private corporations legally collect.
It says the government gathers some information under the auspices of the Patriot Act.
Ohio is also participating and has turned over data to an exchange that supplies information to the federal government, Davis said.
She said the state's Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, under the authority of Attorney General Jim Petro, has turned over 1.6 million criminal records dating to 1944 to MATRIX, or the Multi-State Antiterrorism Information Exchange.
Kim Norris, a Petro spokeswoman, confirmed that the bureau turned over two databases, one for criminal histories and another on electronic registry notification on sex offenders. She said both are to be used only by law enforcement.
"The Ohio attorney general feels very strongly that the MATRIX program is a valuable tool for Ohio law enforcement," she said.
Davis said the ACLU wants the state to stop giving data to MATRIX.
She said 11 states have stopped working with the data-gathering and analysis exchange because of concern they might violate their own privacy laws.
Davis said Ohio's privacy laws do not prohibit this practice. She said the ACLU wants to improve the state's laws, and plans a series of public record requests.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
achatman@plaind.com, 216-999-4115
© 2004 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.
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