Fergie's Tech Blog

Senator Leahy Calls for Summit on Privacy

Grant Gross writes on InfoWorld:

Senator Patrick Leahy on Wednesday called for the U.S. Congress and President George Bush to convene a conference on privacy, in the wake of recent reports that federal agencies spied on U.S. citizens and monitored protestors of the Iraqi war.

Without a new direction from the government, the U.S. is in danger of turning into a "micro-monitoring" state, where the everyday actions of normal citizens are routinely tracked, Leahy said at the Association for Computing Machinery's Life, Liberty and Digital Rights conference in Washington, D.C.

"If this continues, it won't be long before we think of privacy as a quaint 20th century idea," said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. "Our government has no business spying on law-abiding citizens."

posted by Fergie @ 5/03/2006 10:18:00 AM