SAN FRANCISCO, 26 January 2006 — For more than four years since the Sept. 11 attacks, a defiant President George W. Bush has pledged to make unrelenting war on terrorism.

But in recent weeks, US civil liberties advocates are increasingly fearful that the government is also forging ahead with another war — on its own citizens’ basic privacy rights.

Two new controversies have sparked fears of an burgeoning Big Brother, in which faceless spies can eavesdrop without oversight on Americans’ telephone calls or pore over records of their online activities.

The Bush administration’s scheme to tap international telephone calls, first uncovered earlier this month by The New York Times, authorized the National Security Agency — a secretive government arm focused on electronic data collection — to engage in warrantless monitoring of telephone calls between the United States and other countries.

The White House describes the project as a vital tool to monitor what people with suspected links to the terrorist network Al-Qaeda are up to.

“This administration has chosen to utilize every necessary and lawful tool at its disposal,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday. “It would be irresponsible to do otherwise.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s demand for Internet portal Google to hand over search records is part of a legal strategy to overcome constitutional objections to a law that would make it an offense for commercial websites to knowingly make pornographic material available to children.

The law proposed that such sites would have to require registration or credit card verification to keep children out. But in 2004, the US Supreme Court said that the law couldn’t be enforced unless the government proved that it was the only practical way to shield minors from adult-oriented sites.

Government lawyers sought information from leading search engines to show how prevalent sex sites and searches were, in an attempt to meet the Supreme Court’s burden of proof.

While AOL, Yahoo and MSN all agreed to provide information to the government, Google drew a line in the sand, calling the government demand “overreaching” and arguing that turning over information about queries and websites to the US government would shake users’ faith in the company.

While the government’s request from Google does not involve the release of personal information, privacy advocates are concerned that it opens the door to more government fishing expeditions.

“The government is already trying to tap the phones of people it says are linked with Al-Qaeda, without going through the legal process,” says security expert Tim Watkins. “How long before it uses the war on terror to ask Google to identify everyone who searched for the term Al-Qaeda?”

Across the country, editorials in newspapers big and small are beginning to argue that something sinister could be afoot.

“Enough is never enough, not when the US government believes that it can invade Americans’ privacy without repercussions,” noted The New York Times.

In Ontario, California, the local Daily Bulletin said, “These intrusive efforts show how far the Bush administration will go to stretch government power into private lives. ... If the Justice Department is looking at search terms now, what’s next?”

Others point out that the online industry is part of the problem, with companies like Google, Yahoo and many others collecting and storing information to refine their own attempts to put the right advertisements in front of the right web surfers.

“The current controversy only highlights the broader privacy problem: Google logs all of the searches you make, and most if not all of those queries are personally identifiable,” says the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is dedicated to protecting civil liberties in a networked world.

“If Google continues to gather and keep so much information about its users, government and private attorneys will continue to try and get it.”

Watkins says he never uses online mail servers for precisely this reason. He also uses masking technologies such as the EFF’s Tor to help hide his online tracks.

Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at free-market liberal think tank the Pacific Research Institute, says that in the modern digital world, people have to assume that someone is always after their personal information.

“It’s the society we live in, that we’re so open and trusting,” she said. “We make the assumption that everything is OK. And then something like this happens, and it’s a wake-up call. I’m certainly going to think more about where I put my information.”