Surveillance Society Clock

Surveillance Society Clock

It's six minutes before midnight as a surveillance
society draws near within the United States.

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A "Surveillance Society Clock" created by the American Civil Liberties Union will symbolize the encroachment of government spying on private citizens as part of the war against terrorism — and the ticktock is fast approaching midnight.

"The extinction of privacy is a real possibility," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "We believe that privacy is not yet dead — it is a patient on life support."

The online clock is patterned after the "Doomsday Clock," created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 to warn against a nuclear holocaust. Midnight symbolized a total "1984"-style "surveillance society."

"Every generation deserves its own clock," Mr. Steinhardt said in a teleconference yesterday announcing the project and a new report on mass surveillance by the government.

He said that an explosive increase in new technology and data mining is fueling the trend and creating a false sense of security — from satellites to national-identity systems, the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program, DNA data-banking and Web search engines that store every query, even satellites.