Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6
Privacy and the
Government
A system that fails to respect its citizens' right to privacy fails to respect the citizens
themselves.
—- RICHARD NIXON, February 23, 1974
In 2005 a senior at UMass Dartmouth was collecting materials for a research paper on
communism he was writing for one of his history classes. The campus library did not
have a copy of Mao Tse-tung's “Little Red Book,” so he filled out an interlibrary loan
request, giving his name, address, phone number, and Social Security number. A couple
of months later, two agents of the Department of Homeland Security visited him. They
told him the topic is on a “watch list.” The student's interlibrary loan request, combined
with the fact that he had spent significant time abroad, apparently triggered the visit. His
professor said, “I shudder to think of all the students I've had monitoring al-Qaeda Web
sites, what the government must think of that” [1].
On the morning of July 18, 1989, actress Rebecca Schaeffer opened the door to her
apartment and was shot to death by obsessed fan Robert Bardo. Bardo got Schaeffer's
home address from a private investigator who purchased her driver's license information
from the California Department of Motor Vehicles [2]. In response to this murder,
the US Congress passed the Driver's Privacy Protection Act in 1994. The law prohibits
states from revealing certain personal information provided by drivers in order to obtain
licenses.
It also requires states to provide this information to the federal government.
