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.’ ‘Every generation deserves its own clock,’ Mr. Steinhardt said in a teleconference yesterday announcing the project and a new report on mass surveillance by the government. He said that 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 […]