Technological advances over the last decade have birthed a surveillance revolution of an unprecedented scale. The technologies are in wide circulation, yet few people understand what the powerful devices are capable of.

To start with, if your cell phone is on, it is ceaselessly communicating your whereabouts to your provider by a process known as triangulation. The data is systematically stored in your provider’s database and may be subpoenaed or seized by the government (or private litigants in the case of former) as untainted evidence admissible in court. Color laser printers, CD burners and other common devices also now come standard with tracking enablers.

There is a prominent false contention that the Constitution exhaustively protects one’s right against privacy invasion and illegitimate search and seizures. The reality is, the Fourth Amendment only prohibits the government from seizing personal information without a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause, where the information is seized directly from the individual to which it pertains. One should thank the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in United States v. Miller for this. The court held in Miller that there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy in information held by a third party, and hence the Fourth Amendment does not apply to the government seizing or otherwise acquiring such data.

With the growth of digital technology and the resulting proliferation of digital data, the decision in Miller has stripped the constitutional barriers to the point where the government is free to seek personal data maintained by banks, credit card issuers, brokers, airlines, rental car companies, hospitals, insurers, Internet service providers, real estate agents, telephone companies, publishers, libraries, educators, employers and information brokers.

The leeway of the law has also given commercial data brokers, the most prominent ones being Choice Point and Acxiom, the liberty to maintain databases with information on virtually every U.S. citizen and noncitizen. These corporations continually amass billions of records including addresses, phone numbers, credit reports, property records, bank accounts, insurance policies and social security numbers. They then sell this information to corporations, nonprofit organizations and government agencies.

But these aren’t the only parties reaping profits from personal data. According to Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, from January 2005 to February 2007, 104,106,513 records have been compromised (more accurately, stolen) due to security breaches.

After 9/11, under the banner of national security, the president rushed through Congress the USA Patriot Act. One of the many implications of the federal bill was to permit the Department of Defense (DOD) to set up its own comprehensive real time data mining capabilities AND gave it the power to force banks and other companies to give them access to their files.

Once Congress got wind of details of the ‘big brother’ program, called Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Total Information Awareness Program (DARPA’s TIA), they voted to cut funding. This should have been the end of the operation, but as a consultant who worked on the DARPA project put it, ‘When Congress cut the funding, the Pentagon ‘ with administration approval ‘ simply moved the program into a ‘black bag’ account. Black bag programs don’t require Congressional approval and are exempt from traditional oversight.’

The Privacy Act of 1974 may have proved to be an obstacle for the DOD’s surreptitious program, but by using commercial data brokers and other private contractors as a cover for data collection, they have effectively averted congressional auditors. The Privacy Act was designed to frustrate the government’s ability to keep dossiers on American citizens who were not specific objects of investigation.

Speaking in the context of World War I, historian Joan Jenson writes, ‘What began as a system to protect the government from enemy agents became a vast surveillance system to watch civilians who violated no law but who objected to wartime policies or to the war itself.’ I’ll throw out two applicable clich√É©s: ‘history repeats itself’ and ‘knowledge is power, ignorance slavery.’ Democracy isn’t a spectator sport ‘ let’s not treat it as one.

‘ Jen Frank is a senior politics, philosophy and law major, and we think our old friend George Orwell would be proud.