You're being watched
It's a simple task: renewing a bank check card. But first, the Wells Fargo Bank clerk requires personal information, "to help the government fight the funding of terrorism."
How long have you been at your current address? he asks. Are you a U.S. citizen? What are your Social Security and driver's license numbers? Your date of birth? Your home phone number?
"It's part of the USA Patriot Act," explains Sherry Kamkar, the manager of the Santa Monica branch.
Since new security laws were introduced following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, information-gathering has crept into the most basic transactions of American life. Mortgage brokers' identification procedures must, in the words of one Treasury Department directive, help "determine whether the customer appears on any list of suspected terrorists." American Airlines recently became the third airline, after Northwest and JetBlue, to acknowledge giving the personal records of millions of passengers to the government.
But other unprecedented information demands are unrelated to the national security drive. Earlier this year, for example, the Justice Department unsuccessfully attempted to subpoena abortion records from hospitals and Planned Parenthood offices, ostensibly to scrutinize enforcement of late-term abortion laws, saying consumers no longer had a "reasonable expectation" of medical record confidentiality.
These forays into areas previously deemed off-limits are part of a growing culture of official information gathering that has some critics calling for scrutiny.
A chorus of concerned citizens, local officials and organizations -- ranging from municipal and state governments to the American Civil Liberties Union, gun rights groups and conservative Republican legislators -- is calling for a rollback of portions of the Patriot Act, the sweeping law enacted by Congress to fight terrorism six weeks after Sept. 11 that critics contend erodes basic civil liberties.
Technology for accessing personal data has grown by leaps and bounds, creating concerns over the potential misuses of immense troves of personal data -- from addresses and birth dates to Social Security and home phone numbers -- routinely relinquished by consumers everywhere from supermarkets to video and auto-parts stores.
Yet at a time when Western Europe and Canada are responding to this information boom with stricter privacy laws, U.S. privacy guarantees are actually being weakened under the banner of national security, experts say.
