sociology
The politics of privacy in America are imprudent and sentimental, fired by heart-tugging anecdotes that capture public imagination. Not too long ago TV actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by an obsessive fan that obtained her address through the department of motor vehicles. This later led Congress to pass the Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA), which forbids state licensing authorities from releasing the personal information of individuals without their consent. Unlike many European legislatures however, Congress has refused to pass a comprehensive privacy law that declares, as a general principle, that personal information gathered for one purpose should not be disclosed for another without the explicit consent of the individual concerned (Rosen 1). The history of the DPPA shows how debates over privacy tend to be distorted by overemotional sensationalism. The DPPA was promoted as an anti-stalking law after domestic violence advocates insisted that Schaeffer's de!ath was a symptom of a nationwide epidemic of stalking, assault, and murder of women by those who got their home addresses from departments of motor vehicles. In fact, celebrity stalking represents an irrelevant fraction of the invasions of privacy that r
esult from the multimillion-dollar market in personal information sold by state agencies. After forcing individuals to reveal their social security numbers, addresses, and health information in an exchange for a driver's license, greedy states have earned millions by selling the same information to commercial databases. These databases, in turn, are one of the main sources for direct marketers, private investigators, and journalists who want to locate individuals against their will. In the one article I used, a private investigator stated that if he wanted, he could easily get the social security number and address from a database such as Autotrack. Armed with that number, he can get a persons credit history, previous add! Last fall news broke about the existence of Echelon, a spy satellite system run by the National Security Agency along with the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Echelon reportedly scans millions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and faxes each hour, searching for key words. The European Union and the governments of Italy and Russia loudly protested Echelon's intrusions into their supreme domain. A report by the European Union alleged that Echelon has been used for economic espionage, but Former CIA Director James Woolsey told a German newspaper that Echelon collects "economic intelligence" (Williams 3). What is scary is that none of us really want to believe all these things we read or hear about, but the United States Government is so powerful it's creepy. They say that the satellites they have up in space are for economic intelligence, but how do we know? I don't think we are ever going to find out the truth about what they are doing. Although the word "privacy" never appears in the United States Constitution, surveys conducted over the past two decades suggest that most Americans believe that privacy is just as important as any right granted in the Constitution. Celebrities have long complained about having no privacy and now it is a problem for everyone. Since the beginning of the year, threats to the personal sphere have been expanding, leading some to call privacy "the civil rights issue of the 21st century." Whether we like it or not so
Some common words found in the essay are:
Unlike European, Constitution Celebrities, Clipper Chip's, Real World, Fourth Amendment, Clinton President, Tenth Amendment, Dow Chemical, Autotrack Armed, United Government, personal information, past decades, national security agency, social security, european union, clipper chip, economic intelligence, national security, motor vehicles, one's privacy, security agency,
Approximate Word count = 1491
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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