From the Editor

By Martin Lasden
     
With the rapid spread of so much privacy-invading technology, has the right to privacy become as quaint as, say, the federal law that prohibits the torture of overseas prisoners? Ten years ago, well before Facebook caught on, there was already more than enough evidence suggesting that the right to privacy was in serious trouble. In fact, according to PC World magazine, an estimated 400 million phone conversations a year were being overheard by eavesdropping employers and 92 percent of commercial websites were collecting information of a personal nature.
      But at this point who really cares about the lost privacy of ordinary citizens? Certainly not the hyper-connected, let-it-all-hang-out twentysomething crowd. Nor insurers, employers, retailers, wholesalers, or law enforcement. And as for us journalists, while it's true we run the stories that chronicle the many ways privacy is being violated, given what we do for a living, it's not exactly in our interest to press too aggressively for a fundamental right to be left alone.
      Still, even at this late date, certain revelations do have the power to unnerve. Like the story that began leaking out of Washington two winters ago about how, without the benefit of warrants, the big telecommunications companies were cooperating with the Bush administration to monitor trillions of domestic Internet connections in apparent violation of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
      Soon after the news broke, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a small, relatively unknown cyber-rights group in San Francisco, filed a lawsuit against AT&T for its participation in the program. "I come from a technology background, so I had known about EFF for a long time," says Senior Editor Jeanette Borzo, who wrote this month's cover story ("Up Against Big Brother," page 18). "But while I knew them to be in-your-face advocates," she says, "I had never met their lawyers before, and I was eager to learn more about them."
      For Borzo, one of the difficulties of reporting on this fast-moving story was that, as her deadline approached, the AT&T case was moving in unpredictable ways. In fact, at this writing, an intense debate is going on in the Senate over whether to pass legislation supported by the president that would grant immunity to AT&T and others for their cooperation. Should the president get his way? Borzo, who describes herself as "a very private person," admits that she's hardly a neutral observer. "I understand that there are now things that need to be done to protect the country that perhaps didn't need to be done before," she says. "But they should be done legally. If that's not possible, then the laws should be changed. FISA provides the means to secure immunity to cooperating telcos. The fact that they're asking for additional immunity protection indicates to me that they were doing something wrong."
     

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