The government is increasing its ability to monitor average Americans by tapping into the growing amount of consumer data being collected by corporations, according to a report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that defends civil liberties.

“The U.S. security establishment is reaching deeper and deeper into our private lives by forcing the corporate sector to inform on the activities of individuals,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “The government has always recruited informers to help convict criminals, but today that recruitment is being computerized, automated, and used against innocent individuals on a massive scale that is unprecedented in the history of our nation.”

The Privacy Act of 1974 banned the government from maintaining information on citizens who are not the targets of investigations - but the government is increasingly circumventing that requirement by simply purchasing information that has been collected by data aggregators, the report said.

“The government is not just dipping into a preexisting commercial marketplace to purchase Data; companies (Data aggregators) are actually creating and reshaping their products to meet the needs of government security agencies, the ACLU said.

Data companies collect information from public and private databases that include financial reports, education, professional credential and reference verification, motor vehicle records, asset location services, and information on an individual’s neighbors and family members, as well as the “location of witnesses, suspects, informants, criminals, [and] parolees” and the “verification of identity in criminal and civil investigations” and in “national security matters,” according to the report.

“Tens of thousands of federal law enforcement agents have access to these services, with few safeguards against abuse. One of the biggest data aggregators claims to have contracts with at least 35 government agencies,” ACLU said.

The ACLU report, “The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society,” marks the launch of the ACLU’s Surveillance Campaign, which is designed to regain consumers’ personal privacy rights by mobilizing people to contact prominent companies - such as drugstore chains, insurance companies and retailers - to ask them to take a “no-spy pledge” to defend their customers’ privacy against government intrusion, ACLU said.

“An important step in regaining control of our personal privacy is to demand that businesses not acquiesce in being drafted into adjuncts of a surveillance state,” said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program, which produced the report. “If a big company won’t defend its customers’ privacy, then consumers should take their business to a company that will.”

“Government security agencies all too often act on the false premise that they can stop terrorism by tracking information about everyone, while at the same time, private companies are increasingly collecting more information on their customers,” said Jay Stanley, Communications Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program and the author of the report. “Sometimes willingly, sometimes not, the private sector is playing a key role in the push toward a frightening new surveillance society.”

“The amount of direct surveillance that government security agencies can conduct, and the number of people they can hire, will always be limited,” said Stanley. “But leveraging the private sector vastly expands the government’s capacity to invade our lives.”.

(via American Civil Liberties Union)