It seems the NSA snooping scandal has taken a little twist. ABC News journalists Brian Ross and Richard Esposito have claimed that a federal source told them “the government is tracking the phone numbers we … call in an effort to root out confidential sources.”

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

Just another example of how technological advances in the hands of the state tend to result in more subtle control of society. Consider the implications: other journalists may start to refuse to accept leaked information from government sources in fear they’re being tracked. Possible whistleblowers may refuse to come forward with critical information. As usual, the corporate world mirrors government by snooping on employees, too:

Employee-tracking devices are gaining steam thanks to ever-more-accurate GPS technology and a U.S. mandate requiring wireless companies to develop ways for emergency workers to find the physical location of people who dial 911 on a cell phone.

Developed in the 1970s by the U.S. military, GPS uses signals from low orbit satellites to triangulate the position of a ground-based receiver. GPS trackers were once an expensive luxury, but costs have plunged with the expansion of cellular-phone services.

These days I’m constantly reminded of a speech I read a long time ago by Michael Chertoff, then Secretary of Homeland Security. When asked what role the private sector would have with regards to traveller screening on flights, he responded in a way I found remarkably insightfull:

There are number of ways in which the private sector can really add value and play a major role in this process. One is, of course, technological — to the extent we have tools that are more efficient in screening, that’s often an area where the private sector contributes.

Second, where we do — and I want to be very careful about how I say this — where we do screening, and we do need a certain amount of limited information for screening, some of that’s available in the private sector. Now, it may be that it should remain in the private sector, that we don’t want the government to accumulate a lot of data, but that we want to figure out a way to deal with the private sector so that we can get a signal or a flag that there is, for example, with respect to a traveler a reason to be concerned without actually having to dive into the underlying data and get access to things that I think people might be reluctant to have their government see. So I actually think the private sector can help us construct an architecture that will be privacy — pro-privacy and privacy protective, while giving us the ability to see results that will be important in terms of deciding who we have to focus on.

Finally, the private sector can deal with it this way — you’ve got a lot of people traveling almost always for private business, as we talk about trusted traveler programs getting more of the kind of information that allows us, for example, to let people move freely through airports, as we talk about biometric types of identification which maybe become available on a voluntary basis, the private sector can create a marketplace for this. If people, in fact, see value in having a biometric card and volunteering some information for it in return for getting some kind of trusted traveler status, that will create a marketplace for the technology and a marketplace for the systems that we need to drive that forward. So that’s another area where we look to the private sector.
(Emphasis mine)

That about sums it up really. Business creates the marketplace, provide incentives for people to embrace the technology, then hand it over to government officials. Just how, exactly, this creates something that’s “pro-privacy” and “privacy protective”, remains to be seen. This strategy works really well in addition to two others: fear-mongering always works, especially if you use child pornography as the reason; or you can simply threaten corporations (like Qwest was) for being unpatriotic, or that they may not get government contracts in future.