Barbara Sumner Burstyn: Privacy invasion under the thin guise of social need

Have you answered the phone at dinner time to a stranger selling you a better mortgage? Or opened your mail box to find a glossy, personally addressed brochure, even though you didn't request it? Or looked up into the blind eye of a security camera and wondered if your privacy was being invaded? It was. But nothing like it's about to be.

Imagine your every move, your every action, even your thoughts tracked and recorded, all without your knowledge. First, there's radio frequency ID (RFID) in your clothes. RFID tags are tracking devices the size of a grain of dust. They're inserted into items like clothing, cosmetics and car tyres.

Unlike barcodes, which are identical for every unit of the same product, the RFID number is unique to each unit and can be used to secretly identify you. In essence, any chipped item you inadvertently buy is registered to you, making both you and the item trackable.

So, if you buy a new skirt, then wear it a month later, your clothing will beam out your identity to anyone with access to a database - without your permission.

Then there are radar-based devices that can identify you by the way you walk. Operating on the theory that an individual's walk is a unique signature, the Pentagon has financed a research project at the Georgia Institute of Technology that has been 80 to 95 per cent successful in identifying people.

Over at Carnegie Mellon University, researchers in biometrics are developing video recognition methods for "spatio-temporal gaits" and "3-D body tracking".

If that's not scary enough, there is a new concept called Lifelog. Known as ontology surveillance, the system captures, stores, and makes accessible, the flow of one person's experiences and interactions with the world.

Think about it - a system able to trace the threads of your life in terms of events, states, and relationships. By dividing your life into three main categories - physical, transactional, and context or media data - the anytime-anywhere technology would capture what you see, hear, and feel.

GPS, digital compass, and inertial sensors would pinpoint your orientation and movements. Biomedical sensors would capture your physical state. Combine all this with computer-based interactions and transactions throughout the day and the very nature of privacy and who you are in the world alters. And all of this could happen without your knowledge or consent.

According to Privacy International, a London-based human rights watchdog, surveillance has become a fixed component of the burgeoning information economy. Each adult in the developed world is located, on average, in 200 computer databases.

Think it all reads like a Philip K. Dick novel? (Or the movie based on his book, Minority Report.) It's not.

Most of this information comes from the official website of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organisation for the United States Department of Defence. And it all comes under the auspices of an official plan that until last week was called the Total Information Awareness programme.

Renamed Terrorist Information Awareness after civil liberties and privacy groups protested, the programme has been described as a blueprint for unlimited government. With its usual double-speak the Department of Defence denies it is developing dossiers on innocent citizens. Rather, it is protecting people by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats.

As Simon Davies, of Privacy International, says, "The next generation of technology will exploit a growing fusion between people and technology. An intimacy without parallel will mean that areas of life traditionally considered private will be comprehensively revealed. DNA profiling, satellite surveillance, police systems and credit-reporting agencies will all converge."

And we used to think security cameras were an invasion of privacy. While their mechanical eyes may have violated our human dignity, converting our anonymous public lives into somebody's private video collection, the new systems do far more.

Not only do we simultaneously become more anonymous (a collection of data), we also become more exposed with every transaction, interaction and connection we make.

In the coming world, the entire concept of privacy will be vastly changed. Even the presumption of innocence will be consumed by the basis of surveillance theory: the presumption of guilt until proven innocent.

And here's the irony (or is it duplicity?). The "all-surveillance, all-the-time" society is a product of far right governance, of the military-industrial complex that is the conjunction between business and government, of the commitment to free-market philosophies and to the reign of business above all else, under the thin guise of social need.

At the heart of the surveillance society lies fear. A fear of the unknown, unfettered individual. The result will not be a captured terrorist but a captive consumer, signed, sealed and delivered to the market.