Top Intel Exec: Expect Less Privacy November 11, 2007

Here’s a wonderful little harbinger of things to come, courtesy of the Associated Press. As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, “a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy”:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act….The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies. About 40 wiretapping suits are pending.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action suit, claims there are as many as 20 such sites in the U.S.

My problem with this is, in their “safeguarding my private conversations”, they give themselves access to said “private conversations”, making these conversations, in effect, no longer private.

Every call. Every e-mail. Copied onto a “government supercomputer”.

Welcome to the future of “privacy”.