Politics: More lost of PRIVACY!!

"Brave New Era for Privacy Fight"
Wired News (01/13/05); Zetter, Kim

"Privacy proponents are concerned that the erosion of civil liberties will continue in President Bush's second term through a combination of surveillance legislation and commercial technologies and services. In addition to a renewal of Patriot Act provisions urged by Bush, civil libertarians are expecting the administration to promote new Patriot Act II prerequisites; one of the more hopeful signs for privacy advocates is the introduction of the Security and Freedom Ensured Act of 2003, which revises some of the Patriot Act's more intrusive surveillance stipulations. The issue that privacy advocates believe bears the most watching this year is data-mining collaborations between the private sector and government agencies. There are no legal barriers to the government's purchase of information on individuals from commercial data aggregators, nor is there any legislation restricting how such data may be used by federal agencies; conversely, few laws are in place to regulate private companies' disposition of data provided by government agencies. Another concern for privacy advocates is Congress approving the standardization of all U.S. driver's licenses to include machine-readable, encoded data by the end of next year. The provision gives the secretary of transportation, in consultation with the Homeland Security secretary, carte blanche to determine what kind of data to include within 18 months, leading critics to fret that such data could be linked to a national database of citizen profiles accumulated from other sources. Other issues raising civil libertarians' hackles include the deployment of radio-frequency ID tags to track consumers beyond the purchase of retail items, and a possible national adoption of California's DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act, which authorizes the collection of DNA samples from anyone arrested for any crime even if the person has not been charged or convicted."
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,66242,00.html