Paranoia on the streets of Budapest may be the price for less crime, because Budapest districts are planning to install public surveillance cameras all over town. With District V and VIII already under surveillance, Big Brother is extending its operations to Districts VI, VII, XIII and III. The rush to install more cameras was propelled by the "success" of Big Brother's watching eyes in neighboring districts.

Goofing off on the job by Denver city employees has led to drastic measures by local officials. More than 2,000 Public Department vehicles will eventually be fitted with global positioning systems (GPS) so that the movements of the city's 14,000 employees can be monitored at all times by satellite.

The $1.5 million project is a response to an undercover television report that filmed Denver workers dozing on the job, ignoring break-time limits, and playing cards. New GPS technology now has the capability of keeping track of whether a vehicle is occupied, in addition to recording the purpose of a trip, the route taken, the distance traveled, and the time the journey was initiated.

The [British] intelligence service is building a new surveillance center to monitor all e-mails and Internet messages sent and received in Britain. The Sunday Times newspaper reported the center would be up and running within a year inside the London headquarters of the counter-intelligence agency MI5.

The British Government will require Internet service providers such as AOL to have "hardwire" links to the new computer facility so that messages can be traced, the Sunday Times said. The Government already has the power to tap phone lines linking computers, but the sheer growth of the Internet means it is impossible to read all the material. Having the hardwire link would give MI5 the technical capability to read everything.

"A global information infrastructure—potentially the greatest force since the birth of the automobile—is being forged," says Simon Davies, director-general of Privacy International, a London-based civil liberties group. Simultaneously, notes Mr. Davies, "mass surveillance [by corporations and governments] is developing from Argentina to Zambia."

"This generation has seen a significant increase in media intrusion," says Davies. "New technologies create the potential for invasions of privacy and rights on a scale that could scarcely have been imagined even 20 years ago."

The Canadian government dismissed fears that private companies and others would be able to access a vast federal database containing up to 2,000 pieces of information on every Canadian citizen.

The row erupted when privacy commissioner Bruce Phillips released a report saying the Human Resources department had quietly compiled massive files on every Canadian citizen. The information includes details of income tax, employment records, ethnicity, citizenship, travel, education, marital and family status, disabilities and preferred language.

Some compare the idea of a single database containing vast amounts of information on 33 million living and dead Canadians to "Big Brother," the all-knowing and all-powerful figure from George Orwell's novel 1984.

Those who claim to sell safer streets now have a new product on the market—it is a high-tech video surveillance camera. Today's purveyors of safety are claiming to clean up the streets but it's at a price, and the price is our right to privacy.

Today's high-tech entrepreneurs are selling new and improved equipment to spy on people—people walking on the street, passengers on trains or even students going to their high school lockers. This is not the stationary video camera you've grown accustomed to at your local 7-Eleven store. What is being marketed now, as the fix-all solution to crime, are cameras that are able to zoom in from more than 100 yards away and read the print on political flyers being distributed on the public sidewalk, even if it's dark outside. These are cameras that also tape your conversation, even if you're whispering. Indeed, the new video cameras have the capability of peering through the windows of private homes and businesses.

No other technique can record in such graphic detail personal and private behavior. Yet this technique is not explicitly controlled by any law. Laws are needed to protect us from the dangerous and watchful eye of Big Brother, as the new technology creates an almost Orwellian potential for surveillance and invites abuse.

The U.S. National Security Agency has designed and patented a new technology that could aid it in spying on international telephone calls. The patent officially confirms for the first time that the NSA has been working on ways of automatically analyzing human speech.

The NSA's invention is intended automatically to sift through human speech transcripts in any language. The patent document specifically mentions "machine-transcribed speech" as a potential source. Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography, a textbook on the science of keeping information secret, believes the NSA currently has the ability to use computers to transcribe voice conversations.

While cautioning that it was difficult to tell how well the ideas in the patent worked in practice, Schneier said the technology could have far-reaching effects on the privacy of international phone calls. "If it works well, the technology makes it possible for the NSA to harvest millions of telephone calls, looking for certain types of conversations," he said. "This patent brings the surveillance of speech closer to that of text."

Dr. Brian Gladman, former Ministry of Defense director of Strategic Electronic Communications, said that while he doubted the NSA had deployed the patented system yet, the new technology could become a "potent future threat" to privacy. The best way for people to protect their private communications was to use encryption, he said.