Big Brother is watching you'

'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'

George Orwell's "1984"

Last week, the U.K. watchdog group, Privacy International, announced the winners of the annual "Big Brother" award at the 2005 Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in Seattle.

Among the nominees were: A data broker selling personal information to identity thieves, an elementary school attempted to track students with radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags and a consulting firm helping orchestrate an invasive traveler-monitoring system.

The Big Brother award is a dubious prize that is intended to shame both government agencies and companies that have worked hard in invading personal privacy.

The award itself is named after the enigmatic dictator of Oceania from the book "1984" written by George Orwell, while the statue awarded (a golden boot stomping on a human head) is also taken from the book.

"There were so many eligible choices," said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director of U.S. Public Interest Research Group and judge of the panel of privacy experts who picked the nominees. "We should have done it like American Idol and had regionals and semis."

Miezwinski said that, faced with pressure to select finalists from an unusually large pool of nominees, the judges homed in on one of the obvious choices: data broker ChoicePoint.

ChoicePoint received Big Brother's Greatest Corporate Invader award in 2001. This year, after the company made headlines for selling personal information about 145,000 people to criminals, the judges decided to grant the company a Lifetime Menace award.

"I hope that encourages them to straighten out this year," said Mierzwinsk. Miezwinski also said that he was optimistic that the much-publicized security lapses at ChoicePoint and other data dealers will lead to more-stringent regulation of the industry.

"We're approaching that kind of a perfect storm with privacy this year. With so many privacy scandals out there, Congress might actually do the right thing," he said.

The nominee for the Most Invasive Proposal or Project award, the judges tapped Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, California. The principal of the school sought to track individual students with RFID tags in order to simplify taking attendance as well as to reduce vandalism. When parents protested, the school dropped the program.

But Brittan Elementary wasn't the only educational institution cited for invasive privacy practices. The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics won the Worst Public Department award for proposing a program that would collect data on 15 million children in 6,000 schools nationwide.

According to Privacy International, (who also sponsors the Big Brother awards), the proposed program would track information such as credits earned, degree plans, race, ethnicity, grants and loans received, and tax status. The federal government would then hold the data for the life of the student.

The judges chose from the private sector the consulting firm Accenture for the Worst Corporate Invader award. The judges were particularly appalled by the Bermuda-based company's work on a controversial traveler-screening program called US-Visit that would keep fingerprints and other records of visitors to the United States.

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