I used Infomine, because I hoped it would provide me access to some more scholarly research and legal documents. Most popular websites about government surveillance seem to have an edge of “conspiracy!” about them.
I searched three times, first with the term “wiretap”, second with “NSA”, and thirdly with “data mining”.
The two most informative and interesting sites I found were the EEF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) homepage, and a series of CRS (Congressional Research Service) reports.
The EEF, even though it is a publicly run site, seems to be chock full of information. They trawl the web and Congressional hearings every day to get up-to-date information about privacy laws and government activities. That being said, they do display a very clear bias against governmental activities. They believe that people have an unquestionable and indestructable right to privacy, and the government should just butt out. This site is funded by public donations, and appears to have very reliable and current information. It does, however, contain mostly legal information, not actual descriptions of how surveillance works. I will have to look for some more sites that give technical information as well as unbiased information.
The CRS reports will be extremely helpful when we are learning about government surveillance from a legal standpoint. They exhaustively detail Congressional hearings and bills, and they provide a lot of information that the public does not know is available. The site is controlled and funded by the University of Texas, so the information is probably very reliable. This site is excellent for legal information, but it is lacking in technical description and personal opinion. It would be nice to have some sites on wiretapping technology or how government activities have affected the public.
For my next search, I will try to concentrate on surveillance technology, rather than legal information.
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I had a similar problem when I was researching how government surveillance technology works. I could find tons of legal information, but it was much more of a challenge to find descriptions of how the technology actually works.
ReplyDeleteThe EFF is a great source of information. If you look on my blog, I found a Surveillance Self-Defense website that was created by the EFF and describes the technology more. I think it will be really helpful. The EFF website in general though will be a great resource for other aspects of this project, not just how the technology works.
The CRS reports will also be a great resource, but as you said, probably not as much for how the actual technology works. These websites you found will be great for the second part/last questions we have to answer for this research project.
This looks good. Having the scholarly research as the backbone for our presentation will give it more credibility. Also, the information that you found on CRS reports will give us a better idea of the legal side of internet privacy and the patriot act.
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