Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age (2007) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 347-365
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Appendixes
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Such systematic collection of personal information is not a new phenomenon in American society. As far back as the colonial era, organizations were actively interested in the details of people's daily lives.
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1650-1776) Tensions between privacy and information gathering were present during the earliest colonial times.
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Puritan congregations expected their followers not only to eschew those vices themselves, but also to keep watch on others to prevent them from wrongdoing. This mutual watchfulness was central to the colonial system of law enforcement and church discipline.
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ENGAGING PRIVACY AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN A DIGITAL AGE It is also important to note that the type of surveillance widely conducted within the Puritan society differed significantly from surveillance in the 19th and 20th centuries. The political and religious institutions of colonial America were largely informal and unstructured.
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APPENDIX A the capitalist enterprise.4 All three of these modern institutions came into existence in the United States at the end of the 18th century. The escalating tensions between the Colonies and the British government over the arbitrary levying of taxes and the stationing of British troops in New England led to the outbreak of the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill.
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The census collected basic data on the gender, color, and identity of free males above the age of 16 years.7 With time, this crude enumeration tool evolved into a sophisticated source of demographic information employed by social scientists, policy makers, and government officials throughout the country. While the post-Revolution era gave rise to early surveillance practices by the government and the military, its primary contribution to the history of surveillance in the United States was the codification in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of rules restricting invasive information gathering.
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, and the failure of lawmakers to formulate adequate legal protections against surveillance practices. Many contemporary surveillance technologies owe their existence to late-19th-century American enterprise.
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law enforcement agencies. The final technological development of this era that had a marked impact on surveillance practices was the punch-card-tabulating machine.
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They collected vital records, school records, employment records, land and housing records, bank and credit records, professional licensing records, military records, church records, law enforcement records, and many others. Some of these information practices were not new -- birth and death data and church records had been collected as far back as during the colonial era.
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law enforcement authorities in carrying out the presidentially ordered internment of Japanese-Americans. Thus, a surveillance practice established for ostensibly benign statistical purposes was used for the implementation of the most oppressive domestic government action in U.S.
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Public policy and jurisprudence posed few constraints on the intensification of surveillance in bureaucratic record keeping, immigration, law enforcement, and the workplace. Whatever resistance to surveillance was mounted by private property rights before the Civil War largely failed to slow the spread of surveillance in industrial America.
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Despite the advances of organized labor in the 1930s, the vast new middle class was under pressure in the workplace from hiring practices that demanded personal information and strict performance monitoring after the point of hiring. The political loyalty of citizens was questioned on a scale never before witnessed in American society as the anti-Communist mood swept the United States.
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During the 1950s and 1960s, negative reactions to the growing centralization and computerization of records and the continued abuse of surveillance power by law enforcement authorities began to mount. Critics emerged from all sectors of society, including the academy, the mass media, churches, the arts community, and even the corporate world.
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The Privacy Act governed the collection of personal information and outlawed its disclosure without the consent of the individual in question. The exceptions to the antidisclosure clause included standard intraagency use, disclosure under FOIA, routine use for original purposes, and use for the purposes of the census, statistical research, the National Archives, law enforcement, health and safety administration, Congress, the Comptroller General, and court orders.
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In the 1965 Supreme Court case of Griswold . Connecticut, the court rejected a statute forbidding the distribution of birth control information.
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These bills have restricted the disclosure and misuse of personal information within particular industries, but such 29 Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, "The Surveillant Assemblage," British Journal of Sociology 51:605-22, 2001.
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In order to enhance the existing surveillance infrastructure, the President and the Congress enacted the USA Patriot Act of 2001. The act gave the government greater surveillance power over citizens of the United States in order to increase security.
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