Declan McCullagh has a commentary on CNET News.com about privacy in the post-9/11 US. He concludes:
It’s unclear what will happen next. One possibility is that Americans honestly may be so fed up with privacy invasions that they demand that their elected representatives do something. The tremendous interest in the national do-not-call list supports that idea, as does the conspicuous lack of congressional support for the Justice Department’s proposed sequel to the USA Patriot Act.
Another possibility is that the report on Sept. 11–prepared by the two most clandestine committees in Congress and released last week–may lead to more efficient surveillance techniques. Two key findings say the National Security Agency did not want others to think it was conducting surveillance domestically, so it limited its eavesdropping, even against spooks or terrorists inside the United States. The report concludes that the NSA’s policy “impeded domestic counter-terrorist efforts.”
What the report doesn’t say is what should be done about terrorism–and whether that would swing the privacy pendulum back in the other direction.
