Tick...tick...tick...

We keep building a better mousetrap without any thought of who else the machine might eventually be turned upon.

A "Surveillance Society Clock" created by the American Civil Liberties Union will symbolize the encroachment of government spying on private citizens as part of the war against terrorism — and the ticktock is fast approaching midnight.

"The extinction of privacy is a real possibility," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "We believe that privacy is not yet dead — it is a patient on life support."

The online clock is patterned after the "Doomsday Clock," created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 to warn against a nuclear holocaust. Midnight symbolized a total "1984"-style "surveillance society."

...an explosive increase in new technology and data mining is fueling the trend and creating a false sense of security — from satellites to national-identity systems, the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program, DNA data-banking and Web search engines that store every query, even satellites.

"The false security of a surveillance society threatens to turn our country into a place where individuals are constantly susceptible to being trapped by data errors or misinterpretations, illegal use of information by rogue government workers, abuses by political leaders — or perhaps most insidiously, expanded legal uses of information for all kinds of new purposes," the report says.

The number of policy milestones enacted by the government in the current decade rivals that of the entire past century, the report finds. Since 2000, the USA Patriot Act, Real ID, the proliferation of identity checks, health privacy legislation and the NSA "terrorist surveillance program" have been approved by Congress.

The ACLU cites ten major policies regarding privacy in the 20th century, including the founding of the NSA, application of Social Security numbers and the FBI's creation of an electronic fingerprint database.

Social Security was a controversial proposal, and proponents swore the numbers would never be a citizen ID. We see how that turned out. Once we get nationalized health care as well, I'm sure access to our every record will be pretty easy to obtain for our new overlords dedicated public servants.

Concentrated power of any kind is dangerous. Information is power. The more omniscient and ever-present we make our government, the more we are at its mercy. There's a vast difference between fingerprint databases that require probable cause to collect data, and technology that allows unaccountable clandestine surveillance of anyone deemed a potential 'enemy of the state.'