Blown To Bits

Excerpts from Chapter 2: Naked in the Sunlight‚ Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned

1984 Is Here, and We Like It  … Footprints and Fingerprints  … Why We Lost Our Privacy, or Gave It Away  … Little Brother Is Watching  … Big Brother, Abroad and in the U.S.  … Technology Change and Lifestyle Change  … Beyond Privacy

Global Positioning Systems (GPSs) have improved the marital lives of countless males too stubborn to ask directions.  … But change the scenario just a bit and the same technology feels less wonderful. In 2004, Ron Lee rented a car from Payless in San Francisco. He headed east to Las Vegas, then back to Los Angeles, and finally home. He was expecting to pay $150 for his little vacation, but Payless made him pay more‚ $1,400, to be precise.  … When he went out of state, the unlimited mileage clause was invalidated. The fine print said that Payless would charge him $1 per Nevada mile, and that is exactly what the company did. They knew where he was, every minute he was on the road.  …

If you are driving a new GM, Ford, Isuzu, Mazda, Mitsubishi, or Subaru, your car has [an Event Data Recorder or EDR]‚ whether anyone told you that or not.  … When Robert Christmann struck and killed a pedestrian on October 18, 2003,  … the EDR revealed that Christmann had been going 38 MPH in an area where the speed limit was 30. When the data was introduced at trial, Christmann claimed that the state had violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, because it had not asked his permission or obtained a search warrant before retrieving the data. That was not necessary, ruled a New York court. Taking bits from the car was not like taking something out of a house, and no search warrant was necessary.  …

Many cell phones can be reprogrammed remotely so that the microphone is always on and the phone is transmitting, even if you think you have powered it off. The FBI used this technique in 2004 to listen to John Tomero’s conversations with other members of his organized crime family. A federal court ruled that this  “roving bug” installed after due authorization, constituted a legal from of wiretapping. Tomero could have prevented it by removing the battery, and now some nervous business executives routinely do exactly that.