Remember privacy? In these post-9/11 days, it's getting harder to find: gadgets are starting to capture every move we make and word we utter, adding up to what many would classify a police state

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George Christian never expected to be front-page fodder in The Washington Post, but there was his name in the Nov. 5, 2005, edition, in the first paragraph, no less. Just one problem--he couldn't admit to anyone he was the same George Christian in the paper.

"My brother called me from Washington, D.C., and said, 'Is this you?'" Christian recalled. "How many George Christians from Connecticut can there be who work in the library industry? But I had to give him the old shuffle. Anyway, he said he was proud of me."

Christian, executive director of the Library Connection, a cooperative of 27 libraries in central Connecticut, was under a strict gag order as a result of a National Security Letter, a tool expanded by the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 to provide federal investigators warrantless access to phone and Internet data through companies and organizations that provide communication services.

Christian received the letter in July 2005 from two young FBI agents based in New Haven, Conn. The Library Connection shares automated resources for cataloging and circulating materials as well as services such as public Internet access. In the spring of 2005, one patron in one library logged onto a Web site that caught the FBI's attention. Investigators wanted to know who that patron was.

"I said you are asking for what we know about the user of an IP address [a series of numbers that identifies a specific user on the Internet] for 45 minutes five months ago," Christian said. "There's just no way. And quite seriously the agent looked at me said, 'No, we have ways.'"

Technology and surveillance

Christian is just one of an estimated 300,000 people who have received National Security Letters requesting access to personal data. Phone records, Internet usage, bank statements and telephone conversations are just some types of information agents have gathered either through National Security Letters or surveillance.

In September, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero struck down the provision in the Patriot Act that allowed for the expanded use of National Security Letters, but there are still plenty of ways the government's eyes peep into what we thought were our private lives.

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"The government always had the theoretical capacity to read all of the mail," said Geoffrey R. Stone, professor of law at the University of Chicago and author of Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. "But even if theoretically they could have read everybody's mail, they couldn't have done anything with the information unless it was obviously extreme. Whereas today, given the technology of computers, if they could read everybody's mail, or e-mail, it could all be stored and later accessed in a way that's good for law enforcement and extremely unnerving from the standpoint of individual privacy."

With the advent of breakneck technological changes in recent years, what it means to be in public might change radically. Gadgets are starting to capture every move we make and word we utter. Computers that use biometrics to identify people, high-powered recording devices that become ever smaller and easier to disguise, cheap storage of data and powerful search tools to scour that data all add up to what many would classify a police state.

"It's come up already in using infrared technology. The Supreme Court said, 'Just because the camera is stationed outside of the house, if you are reading into the house, you need a warrant,'" said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

"Traditionally we've decided what you do in a public place can be monitored," Schwartz said. "And if you're doing it in your home, you can't be monitored, that's the distinction that we've made."

England is perhaps the most noted country for its acceptance of surveillance through video. But despite reports last summer touting the effectiveness of street cameras in capturing would-be car bombers, a 2005 report showed that most closed-circuit television had not been effective because of lack of staffing.

"Constitutionally, they can [use cameras], they can have surveillance, you have no constitutional right to privacy from being photographed on the street," said James Carafano, senior analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "On the other hand, by and large these aren't terribly effective instruments. So I would argue, why would you use a lot of TV cameras in a lot of places when it's fairly useless? Then you are creating a chilling effect by living in a surveillance society."

Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says cooperation between government and corporations is adding another layer of intrusion.

"My concern is a hybrid of using the mass networks as a collection point for listening in on Americans' conversations and reading our e-mails, gathering information about us, and then denying us the right to know what exactly is happening with that information," Granick said.